The New York Instances ran a prolonged interview this morning between columnist Ross Douthat and enterprise capitalist and PayPal founder Peter Thiel. There is a motive it was printed 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 a wide range 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 assume 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 relatively than verifiable information, with not less than 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. Persons are fully caught on beta amyloids. It’s clearly not working. It’s just a few type of a silly racket the place the persons are simply reinforcing themselves.
It is a fairly daring declare! It is also fully unfaithful.
“There was no remedy 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, advised Engadget. “What we have been in a position to do within the final 20 years has been really fairly extraordinary. We have developed markers that assist us establish when this illness begins, utilizing the utilizing amyloid markers and tau biomarkers, we all know that the illness really begins 20 years earlier than the signs do, and that could be a vital factor to know if we’re going to forestall this illness.”
In the intervening time, Alzheimer’s stays incurable. However the absence of a miracle treatment doesn’t negate the accomplishments to date 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 growing the neurotransmitters obtainable to the to the mind cells.” Johnson, whose group runs one of many largest and longest research on folks in danger for growing Alzheimer’s illness, added, “Now we now have alternatives to truly modify the illness biology by means of the amyloid pathway, but additionally we’re centered on the opposite proteinopathy — which is tau — and there is scientific 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 folks) sees the state of scientific analysis on this space as sluggish and threat averse. However the groundbreaking work is occurring at this second. Professor Johnson pointed to a monoclonal antibody known as gantenerumab. In an early take a look at of 73 individuals with inherited mutations that will trigger them to overproduce amyloid within the mind, it minimize the variety of individuals who developed Alzheimer’s signs virtually in half. “The large phase-three prevention trials are taking place proper now.” These are utilizing lecanemab and donanemab, two different monoclonal therapies, which Johnson clarified are “already recognized to be higher than gantenerumab at clearing out beta-amyloid.”
For somebody who fashions himself as a heterodox thinker, Thiel definitely appears to have came across a remarkably comparable speaking level to present Trump administration FDA head Robert F Kennedy Jr. “Alzheimer’s is a really, excellent 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 stated at a Division of Well being budgetary listening to final month. He claimed the NIH was “slicing off some other speculation” resulting from “corruption.”
Unsurprisingly, the Alzheimer’s Affiliation has known as this “demonstrably false.”
“In actuality, over the latest 10 years obtainable (2014-2023), lower than 14% of latest Nationwide Institutes of Well being (NIH) Alzheimer’s tasks centered on amyloid beta because the therapeutic goal,” the group wrote, “As of September 2024, the Nationwide Institute on Growing older was investing in 495 pharmacological and non-pharmacological trials. To state that Alzheimer’s analysis is targeted on amyloid to the exclusion of different targets is clearly improper.”
If I, personally, needed extra sturdy medical analysis and an opportunity at everlasting life (I do not), greasing the wheels of an administration broadly gutting funding for science can be an odd technique 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 report giving them free reign to do it.
Replace June 27, 2025 2:15ET: This story now contains further scientific trial data.
