PCS general secretary FRAN HEATHCOTE explains why opposing war is inseparable from defending jobs, wages and public services – and why readers should come to the London Peace Conference on Saturday June 20
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Pics and it didn’t happen
Fraud in Alzheimer’s research raises difficult questions about the current state of science, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
GROUP SUPREMACY: Alois Alzheimer (standing third from right) with his research group at the Nervenklinik in Munich 1909-1910
[Public domainc/CC]
As protests erupt over Henry Nowak’s murder, ANDREW MURRAY argues that anger is being exploited to advance a wider racist and anti-immigration agenda
CARLOS MARTINEZ explains the sound case for car manufacturing co-operation with China
The National Emergency Briefing outlines the need for urgent action to address environmental crisis, says PAUL DONOVAN, warning that there’s no time to indulge the arguments of the fossil-fuel-funded climate-change deniers
Campaigners say criticism of Labour MP Stephen Morgan’s position on Gaza has been met with police intervention and cancelled opportunities for debate. HESTER WOLFE reports
The Committee for the Defence of Iranian People’s Rights warns of escalation danger in Iran war
IN MOST cases of peer review, scientists review a paper for free while the publisher makes a huge profit margin. Two of the world’s biggest academic publishers are Springer Nature and Elsevier: their recent profit margins range from 28 to 38 per cent. The fees charged by these publishers are generally paid for by research grants; in Britain, that is mostly public money. The status quo of science is worth a lot of money — for some.
However, not everything that is peer-reviewed is valid. A recent book published this month, Charles Piller’s Doctored, covers the story of fraud in research on Alzheimer’s disease — all of which had been peer-reviewed.
One of the leading theories in the late 20th century about Alzheimer’s was that the accumulation of amyloid proteins was to blame. Amyloids, named after their resemblance to starch molecules, clump together into tangles of gunk in the brain.
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