📈 first Derivative [119]
“Christianity’s decline in U.S. appears to have halted”
Just finished reading Rabbit, Run for my book club. Now I have to go back and reread that David Foster Wallace essay on Updike in Consider the Lobster. If you have any book recommendations, please let me know.
For my new subscribers, the last issue was a free one but usually issues will be paywalled in the middle for paid subscribers to read fully first. They’re opened up for everyone a week later though. If you’d like to get that early read, please consider subscribing.
If you’re in New York, I recommend checking out the Caspar David Friedrich exhibit that’s at the Met until May 11. I haven’t been yet but I’m really excited to check it out. Also, the art in the last issue was from Han Youngsoo, one of my favorite photographers. The New Yorker did a nice profile on him recently that I meant to include last time.
Highlights in this issue:
Alzheimer’s research fraud
declining secularization?
drone warfare
Good reading,
—TK
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You don’t have to look far to see the effects of Alzheimer’s, often with older family members in our own lives. “In the United States, more than 11 million family members and other unpaid caregivers (such as friends and neighbors) care for fathers and mothers, spouses and grandparents who have fallen prey to dementia.” That’s why I think this story is so impactful and undercovered.
Up to 420,000 adults in the prime of life — including people as young as 30 — suffer from early-onset Alzheimer’s. The annual number of new cases of dementia is expected to double by 2050.
The dominant theory of Alzheimer’s research has for decades been the amyloid hypothesis, spurring research into drugs that aim to clear amyloid plaques from the brain.
“It holds that amyloid proteins prompt a cascade of biochemical changes in the brain that cause dementia. The supremacy of that hypothesis has exerted enormous pressure toward scientific conformity…
Nearly every drug approved for Alzheimer’s dementia symptoms is based on it, despite producing meager results. The anti-amyloid antibody drugs approved in the United States cost tens of thousands of dollars per patient per year, yet they slow cognitive decline so minutely that many doctors call the benefits imperceptible. The drugs are also not benign, posing risks of death or serious brain injury, and they can shrink the brain faster than Alzheimer’s itself.
The entrenchment of the amyloid hypothesis has fostered a kind of groupthink where grants, corporate riches, career advancement and professional reputations often depend on a central idea largely accepted by institutional authorities on faith.”
A 2022 investigation discovered that a key 2006 experiment that helped push forward the amyloid hypothesis used falsified data and doctored images. Last year that paper was finally retracted. The fraud, however, wasn’t a one-off case.
“Take for example the revered neuroscientist Eliezer Masliah, whose groundbreaking research has shaped the development of treatments for memory loss and Parkinson’s disease, and who in 2016 was entrusted to lead the National Institute on Aging’s expanded effort to tackle Alzheimer’s. With roughly 800 papers to his name…
Over several months the group created a 300-page dossier comprising 132 papers by Dr. Masliah that they deemed suspicious… The experiments in those papers had been cited more than 18,000 times in academic and medical journals. The scale of apparent misconduct, including in many papers related to the amyloid hypothesis, uncovered in just a fraction of Dr. Masliah’s work stunned leading experts.”
The whole article is worth reading as it raises the need for a wholesale reevaluation of the structural incentives in place that pressures on researchers to commit this kind of fraud, rewards its success, and then ignores evidence of fraud to deny blame and protect institutional reputations.
The saddest part of course, is how many lives have been lost, because promising areas of research were underfunded or shunned because they didn’t align with the dominant amyloid paradigm.
“For years, powerful promoters of the amyloid hypothesis ignored or dismissed the infection hypothesis for Alzheimer’s, effectively rendering it invisible, Dr. Itzhaki said with exasperation. Research suggests that viruses may hide undetected in organs, including the brain, for years, causing symptoms divergent from the original infection.”
✝️ According to a new study, “Christianity’s decline in U.S. appears to have halted,” and young people are driving the change. Literally a first (second?) derivative story. I’m always interested in these because for decades our background default story has been a trend of increasing secularization. It’s too early to tell but we may be at inflection point reversing that.
“People in the youngest age group in the new survey, born between 2000 and 2006, appear to defy that trend. They are still less likely than average to identify as Christian, and far less likely than the oldest Americans. But, intriguingly to researchers, they appear no less religious than survey participants in the second-youngest cohort, born in the 1990s…
The youngest survey participants stood out in other ways, too. The gap in religiosity between men and women is far smaller than it is in older generations. Typically, women are more religious than men on a variety of measures.”
🚁 Tactical drones are now inflicting two-thirds of Russian losses in Ukraine, according to a new report from a UK defense think tank. I’ve seen a lot of drone cam footage on Twitter but I’m surprised how high that number is.
I highlighted drones back in 2017 and more recently in the context of a profile on Alex Karp. I think this is an area where the mainstream conception is still catching up to the fact that modern warfare is now drone warfare, as we’ve seen now not only in the Ukraine war between two nation state militaries but with Hamas and Israel too.
🦠 H5N1 bird flu is spreading in the US. The first fatality in the country was reported in January. Something to keep on eye on, but to date no cases of human-to-human transmission have been identified yet and the virus is spreading mainly on cattle and dairy farms. Another reason why egg prices have been so high lately.
🛡 I wrote a bit last July about Sweden’s highly competitive military service program and how it made me think of people who say we should institute mandatory military service to address our socio-civic issues:
“Instead of a sweeping conscription, we could have a selective and competitive program that people would self-select into. Less national draft, more military Y Combinator. You’d test in and go to bootcamp for 6-12 months and come out with this imprimatur, a community, and eventually an alumni network. In fact, you probably wouldn’t need the government at all to do a small scale version of this, a privately funded Thiel fellowship-type thing. I wonder if this is already happening?”
It turns out an even closer model is the elite Israeli intelligence division, Unit 8200:
“Members of Unit 8200, known for its advanced cybersecurity and cyberwarfare capabilities, have founded dozens of cybersecurity companies. Others have become influential venture capitalists in their own rights and are mentors to entrepreneurial graduates. There are at least five tech companies started by Unit 8200 alumni publicly traded in the U.S., together worth around $160 billion. Private companies started by ex-8200 soldiers are worth billions more…
The Israeli military recruits for Unit 8200 as early as grade school, scouring robotics clubs and after-school coding programs for talent. Once soldiers have worked in the unit, they typically stay in touch with commanders and fellow recruits for life.”
Here’s a link to my 2025 News Journal where I'm collecting the headlines that catch my interest each day so that when we look back at that at the end of the year, we'll see when things happened, what kind of patterns emerged, without the problem of hindsight bias.
You’ve made it all the way to the end! Thanks for reading fD. You can support my work by upgrading to premium or share the newsletter with a friend. —TK