I think this is very troubling for the university, in part because of the stature of Karen Ashe and the fact that this came out of her lab. Support MPR News Today Heart How much of a black eye does the University of Minnesota have at this point? It should require a very strong evaluation. What I will say is that now that it's clear, it means that anything that's followed from it that depended on those results, for other research that credited that work as being fundamental to understanding in the field, all of those things should be looked at again. No, I don't think that would be an appropriate conclusion to reach. Does that mean that all of the research at the University of Minnesota would be called into question? It has been cited 1000s of times by other scholars and is thought to be one of the more influential papers in the field of Alzheimer's in this entire 21st century. So one of these papers was very important. Well, according to analysis by a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University by the name of Matthew Schrag who looked at dozens of papers, written by Sylvain Lesné, a very highly acclaimed professor there -what Schrag found was a troubling series of apparently doctored images, images that appeared to have been manipulated, so that they were not the accurate representation of data as described in the papers. Can you briefly explain the allegations that are being made?
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MPR News host Cathy Wurzer spoke to the article's author, Charles Piller, on Morning Edition on Thursday. Photo by Randy Pench, courtesy of Charles Piller.Īt the heart of the investigation are a series of images in a key study that have been allegedly falsified.