Greg's Blog

Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream by Megan Greenwell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The world being what it is, I am getting more and more defensive about not reading depressing things (books, social media, movies). Obviously there’s a balance that has to be struck here, because I don’t want to bury my head in the sand, but reading about the horrors around the world every day is not good for my mental health.

Anyway, I write that to say: I expected this book to be depressing, and it was, but it ended on a much more hopeful note than I anticipated. It’s also very well-written; I was worried that the structure (following four people whose lives were affected by private equity and alternating through them) would make it hard to follow, but I didn’t have any problem with that.

My main takeaways from the book:
– Some of the problem here is in the nature of capitalism; private equity can just turbocharge that. Hospitals, for example, should really be nonprofit, and in other industries more regulation is needed.
– We really should change how we tax carried interest, as it’s pretty unfair right now. (Elizabeth Warren has introduced bills along these lines! But they haven’t gone anywhere…)
– I still don’t quite understand why leveraged buyouts are legal? It sure seems like they shouldn’t be!


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Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s by Charles Piller

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A good read although pretty infuriating! It sure looks like some people faked some results that led a bunch of Alzheimer’s researchers down a wrong path that cost us lots of money and time.

It has been known for a while that amyloid deposits in the brain are often found in Alzheimer’s patients. The hypothesis was that treating these deposits would help Alzheimer’s patients, but drugs that were targeted at doing that didn’t seem to actually help patients.

Then in 2006 a paper was published saying that injecting a particular kind of amyloid (“amyloid-beta star 56”) into rats brains, they started exhibiting symptoms of Alzheimer’s (p. 72). This was hailed as a breakthrough and reinvigorated the amyloid hypothesis, and was cited thousands of times by other scientists (p. 118). The trouble is, the paper was fake; all the authors but one agreed to retract the paper in 2024. (the one who didn’t is kinda the main character (derogatory) of the book) But Alzheimer’s research related to this rose from basically nothing to $287 million of NIH grants in 2021 (source: this article that was the first article to raise concerns about the paper, and the impetus for writing the book)

When I saw a summary of the book, I thought “wow, it seems like someone should go to jail for this?” And I guess the main character above did eventually lose his job, and a scientist involved in alleged fraud around one of the many Alzheimer’s drugs that didn’t work was prosecuted for fraud but just had the case dismissed. And I get that prosecuting someone for bad science is a pretty extreme step, but in this case the fraud was blatant (and repeated!) and led to a bunch of researchers wasting time and money, not to mention patients being in trials for drugs that had no real hope of working. Things should have consequences!

The way the papers were fakes seemed pretty weird to me; apparently it’s very common to include images of results in papers, and in all of these cases the images themselves were faked. (for example, parts were duplicated from another section of the image) Once you know what you’re looking for, this is pretty easy to detect, and many more examples have been found. But it seems to me like it would be easy to fake other parts, too; was this kind of fraud detected just because it’s easy to do, and we’re missing less obvious fraud? (I don’t really know much about this, it just seemed strange)

Matthew Schrag, the scientist who found a lot of these fraudulent papers, initially thought that some of the fraud may have been just fudging results to make things look more perfect. In some cases this may have been true, but in a lot of cases you could see falsified images in paper after paper after paper of some authors. (p. 100)

Other interesting parts:
– After one of the papers was challenged by a journal, the authors sent in a few of the original, unedited images. But those images also had clear signs of doctoring! (p. 105)
– The actual “amyloid hypothesis” seems to keep changing as earlier versions seem more unlikely. This reminds me of string theory which some physicists see as “unfalsifiable” because there are so many ways to tweak it. (p. 154)
– Not really related, but in 2015 the guy who ran a UCSD Alzheimer’s research center attempted to “hijack” the lab and move it to USC, which really raises a bunch of questions for me! (p. 253)
– One dossier found 132 papers(!) with questionable images from the director of neuroscience at the National Institute of Aging. (he no longer has that position) (p. 265)
– One of the people investigating all this believes that misconduct is more common in papers that are stating what other people believe, since those are papers that are easier to get published. (p. 282)


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