It is sobering for anyone teaching ethics that it can be just so darned hard for even well-meaning people to act as they know they ought. Even academics and scientists. For example, we have written before about Francesca Gino, a behavioral ethics scholar at Harvard who has come out on the bad end of an ethics investigation regarding a number of her many, many papers studying human behavior, often in the ethics realm. Scientists studying moral decision-making are themselves human and therefore likely to be influenced by the sorts of social and organizational pressures, cognitive biases, and situational factors that can adversely impact the moral choices of all human beings.
This sad fact is highlighted in Charles Piller’s new book Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s (2025). This is a long and exhaustively researched book by an investigative journalist for Science magazine. It is summarized nicely in a review of the book by The Guardian’s James Ball:
…for decades, something called the amyloid hypothesis has dominated research into Alzheimer’s, determining how billions of dollars of public and private funding into new drugs was spent. The brains of people who had died with it showed clumps of sticky protein – called amyloid plaques – between neurons. It seemed logical that these might be responsible for the disease’s symptoms. And while this became the main line of inquiry, it never quite delivered on its early promise. Many people with amyloid plaques didn’t have signs of Alzheimer’s, for example. Something seemed to be missing.
And then came what seemed like decisive proof: a 2006 paper from the University of Minnesota, which went on to become one of the most cited in the field, showed that a sub-type of amyloid led to memory impairment. It wasn’t until 2022 that scientific sleuths suggested that key images on which the research relied might have been Photoshopped to better fit the hypothesis. At first, the scientists fought back against the claims, but the 2006 paper has now been retracted, as have others based around the same findings. As the book explains, investigations continue and several key figures involved deny any knowledge of wrongdoing.
To be clear, hundreds of papers written over decades by scores of scientists, many being world leaders in Alzheimer’s research, have recently been retracted or called into deadly serious question. These scientists’ research agendas attracted billions of dollars in federal grant money and even more billions in private investment. As Ball hints, this work sent one of our most important areas of medical research down a blind alley, at the expense of what must now be considered more promising avenues for discovery.
Piller focuses mostly on the “how” question. He recounts much Photoshopping and other tricks that provided illusory support for the conclusions of various Alzheimer’s studies. When he addresses the “why” question, we see at work many of our old behavioral ethics friends that we address so often here at Ethics Unwrapped.
Certainly, there’s some obedience to authority in the picture. We are all wired to wish to please those in a position of authority. And this book contains several examples of graduate, undergraduate, and even high school lab assistants consciously or unconsciously knuckling under to pressure from prominent researchers running the labs to fudge the numbers or alter the photographic evidence. Fortunately, some of those helpers later became whistleblowers or at least provided evidence to support allegations of scientific fraud by their former mentors.
Matthew Schrag, a Vanderbilt University scientist who is the central hero of Piller’s book for his work in uncovering research wrongdoing, wondered if one of the key fraudsters, Sylvain Lesné, might have been influenced by his French mentors. In a quick search, Schrag uncovered 32 papers showing clear evidence of research impropriety by these mentors.
There’s the conformity bias, the tendency we all have to take our cues as to how to act from those around us. The more popular a view is, the easier we will find it to go along with that view. Piller quotes Schrag as saying:
You have a group of people who have achieved such intellectual dominance over the field that it may have contributed to an environment where people felt like they had to bring their findings into general alignment with this dominant hypothesis to reach some level of acceptance[, at times even doctoring data to align more neatly]… (p. 263)
Professor Schrag compared one widely-quoted but bogus study’s influence to a Sasquatch music festival video:
Some uninhibited individual stands up on the side of the hill and starts dancing in a wild way. Everybody looks at him like he’s weird. Then a second guy stands up and starts dancing with him. Little by little people jump in until the hillside is covered in people doing crazy dance moves. It’s something about the second and third voices that come in that normalizes a concept.” (p. 259)
There’s incrementalism, the slippery slope. This influence pops up several times in the book, including Schrag’s assessment of two scientists whose fudging seems to grow and grow: “Initially, I thought that [they] probably believed their own core argument, and started by possibly fudging results to make things look more perfect. I thought I saw a slippery slope, where things seem more and more brazen, more and more outlandish as time went by.” (p. 85)
Perhaps in Sylvain Lesné’s case mentioned above in connection with obedience to authority, there was some incrementalism as well. A French neuroscientist told Piller: “You could propose a nice ‘psychological interpretation’ for your story: When you are mentored, like Lesné, by scientists that cut corners, then it’s like the ‘boiling frog experiment: “You’ve seen it once, why couldn’t you do it a little bit more?” (p. 209)
As is often the case, the most powerful force at work in cases of scientific fraud is likely the self-serving bias which causes us to see things in ways that support our best interests and our pre-existing points of view. The more that is at stake, the greater the influence of this bias. Scientists working for pharmaceutical companies may have millions of dollars of funding and perhaps billions of dollars of potential profits at stake. Professors at universities may have publications, promotions, funding, patents, and their own start-ups hanging in the balance.
With motivations like that, one might consciously decide to cheat. More often, scientists are likely to fall victim to a range of cognitive biases that spring from the self-serving bias. Piller mentions the expectation bias—where scientists deceive themselves by “deeming all results as somehow consistent with prevailing ideas.” (p. 263)
An additional reason this occurs is loss aversion, the fact that most people hate losses more than they enjoy gains and are more likely to cheat when acting in a loss frame. When a particular theory leads to publications and grant money or industry investment, then the scientists’ minds will fight hard to avoid losing those accoutrements of success. Boston University scientist Andreas Charidimou is quoted by Piller: “Multiple labs and investigators have invested their careers, their funding—their whole narrative—on the amyloid hypothesis. It’s hard for them to even think about being wrong.” (p. 263)
At the end of the day, we agree with Matthew Schrag’s conclusion that the primary lesson from all his work uncovering and disclosing scientific malfeasance in this critical area of research is to “very intentionally teach research ethics and integrity when we’re training students so that it becomes ingrained in our identity as scientists.” (p. 261)
Sources:
James Bell, “Doctored by Charles Piller Review—the Scandal that Derailed Alzheimer’s Research,” The Guardian, Feb. 20, 2025.
Daniel Engber, “The Business School Scandal that Just Keeps Getting Bigger,” The Atlantic, Nov. 19, 2024.
Apoorva Mandavilli, “Embattled Alzheimer’s Researcher Is Charged with Fraud,” New York Times, June 28, 2024.
Charles Piller, Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s (2025).
Charles Piller, “Potential Fabrication in Research Images Threatens Key Theory of Alzheimer’s Disease,” ScienceInsider, Feb. 10, 2025.
Videos:
Conformity Bias: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/conformity-bias
Incrementalism: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/incrementalism
Loss Aversion: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/loss-aversion
Obedience to Authority: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/obedience-to-authority
“Sasquatch Music Festival 2009-Guy Starts Dance Party, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA8z7f7a2Pk.
Self-serving Bias: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/self-serving-bias
Blog Posts:
“Academic Dishonesty in Ethics Studies”: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/academic-dishonesty-in-ethics-studies