The New York Occasions ran a prolonged interview this morning between columnist Ross Douthat and enterprise capitalist and PayPal founder Peter Thiel. There is a cause it was revealed within the opinion part.
Thiel, a Trump booster whose allies — together with Vice President JD Vance — now litter the White Home, was given free reign to debate quite a lot of subjects throughout over an hour of softball questions. Is Greta Thunberg the literal antichrist? Are the three predominant ideological faculties in Europe environmentalism, “Islamic Shariah legislation” and “Chinese language Communist totalitarian takeover”? Is AI “woke” and able to following Elon Musk to Mars? Peter appears to suppose so! Maybe the “simply asking questions” college of journalism may add “hey, what the fuck are you speaking about” to its repertoire.
Admittedly, many of those assertions fall squarely into the realm of issues that exist inside Thiel’s thoughts palace somewhat than verifiable details, with a minimum of one notable exception. Comparatively early of their chat, Peter tells Ross the next [emphasis ours]:
If we take a look at biotech, one thing like dementia, Alzheimer’s — we’ve made zero progress in 40 to 50 years. Individuals are utterly caught on beta amyloids. It’s clearly not working. It’s just a few type of a silly racket the place the individuals are simply reinforcing themselves.
It is a fairly daring declare! It is also utterly unfaithful.
“There was no therapy 40 or 50 years in the past for Alzheimer’s illness,” Sterling Johnson, a professor of Geriatrics and Gerontology on the College of Wisconsin, Madison, informed Engadget. “What we have been capable of do within the final 20 years has been truly fairly extraordinary. We have developed markers that assist us determine when this illness begins, utilizing the utilizing amyloid markers and tau biomarkers, we all know that the illness truly begins 20 years earlier than the signs do, and that may be a essential factor to know if we’re going to forestall this illness.”
For the time being, Alzheimer’s stays incurable. However the absence of a miracle treatment doesn’t negate the accomplishments up to now in detection and prevention. “The primary therapies have been these window dressing therapies. It is like treating the signs such as you would deal with a chilly […] The primary technology of amyloid remedy was that type of strategy the place it simply addressed the signs by amping up the neurons and rising the neurotransmitters out there to the to the mind cells.” Johnson, whose workforce runs one of many largest and longest research on individuals in danger for growing Alzheimer’s illness, added, “Now we’ve got alternatives to truly modify the illness biology by means of the amyloid pathway, but additionally we’re targeted on the opposite proteinopathy — which is tau — and there is medical trials underway.”
Thiel, a well known advocate for developments in radical life extension (together with a reported curiosity in injecting himself with the blood of younger individuals) sees the state of scientific analysis on this space as sluggish and danger averse. However the groundbreaking work is occurring at this second. Professor Johnson pointed to a monoclonal antibody referred to as gantenerumab. In an early take a look at of 73 contributors with inherited mutations that will trigger them to overproduce amyloid within the mind, it lower the variety of contributors who developed Alzheimer’s signs virtually in half. “The massive section three prevention trials [of gantenerumab] are taking place proper now.”
For somebody who fashions himself as a heterodox thinker, Thiel definitely appears to have came upon a remarkably related speaking level to present Trump administration FDA head Robert F Kennedy Jr. “Alzheimer’s is a really, superb instance of how [National Institute of Health] has gone off the rails over the previous 20 years in the past with analysis on amyloid plaques” Kennedy mentioned at a Division of Well being budgetary listening to final month. He claimed the NIH was “reducing off some other speculation” as a result of “corruption.”
Unsurprisingly, the Alzheimer’s Affiliation has referred to as this “demonstrably false.”
“In actuality, over the newest 10 years out there (2014-2023), lower than 14% of recent Nationwide Institutes of Well being (NIH) Alzheimer’s tasks targeted on amyloid beta because the therapeutic goal,” the group wrote, “As of September 2024, the Nationwide Institute on Growing old was investing in 495 pharmacological and non-pharmacological trials. To state that Alzheimer’s analysis is concentrated on amyloid to the exclusion of different targets is clearly incorrect.”
If I, personally, needed extra strong medical analysis and an opportunity an everlasting life (I do not), greasing the wheels of an administration broadly gutting funding for science can be a wierd approach to make that occur. However that is the form of incoherence we have come to count on from tech oligarchs: they are saying what advantages them, even when it is nonsense on its face, even when a second’s reflection reveals it to be patently false. What’s embarrassing is the paper of file giving them free reign to do it.
