The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) said in a statement that an internal investigation had found evidence of image falsification and fabrication in two scientific articles by neuropathologist Eliezer Masliah, 65. Masliah had been the director of the Division of Neuroscience at the National Institute on Aging, an NIH research center, since 2016. According to the announcement, he no longer holds any executive role at the institution. The researcher, who made his career at the University of California, San Diego, had been leading a billion-dollar effort to investigate Alzheimer’s disease for eight years. In the last fiscal year alone, he was responsible for a research budget of US$2.6 billion.
An expert in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, Masliah has published more than 800 papers on how these diseases damage human synapses (the regions of contact between neurons). He also wrote influential articles on a protein linked to both diseases called alpha-synuclein. His prestige suffered a first blow two years ago when an investigation by the journal Science found that he used the same Western Blot images (a method used in molecular biology to identify proteins) and brain tissue micrographs in articles describing different experiments. More recently, a neuroscientist and a forensic analyst produced a 300-page dossier revealing a long line of suspicious images used in 132 papers published by Masliah between 1997 and 2023.
The story above was published with the title “Suspicious images in articles lead to downfall of director of Alzheimer’s research program” in issue 345 of November/2024.
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