The doctors approached Jordan Thomas, who initially was dubious. “We were both so emotional about it that Jordan thought we were a little bit out there,” Pitt recalled. At Thomas’s urging, the doctors sent Cassava’s papers to ten prominent experts, including the neuroscientists Thomas Südhof, of Stanford, who received the Nobel Prize in 2013; Roger Nicoll, of the University of California, San Francisco; and Don Cleveland, of the University of California, San Diego. Bredt and Pitt were immediately struck by the fact that Cassava—despite having won Wall Street over with its audacious promises about revolutionizing the treatment of Alzheimer’s—had gained little renown among specialists in the field. Bredt said, “The first question we asked was ‘Have you ever heard of Cassava Sciences?’ And every single one of them said no.”
When the scientists consulted Cassava’s research papers, “the main reaction was ‘Oh, my God, how could they get away with this?’ ” Pitt said, adding, “These Western-blot images are hard to fake. It appeared that someone had tried to crop them and cut out little pieces of one and put them in another.” Many of Wang’s papers were co-authored by Dr. Lindsay Burns, a senior vice-president at Cassava—and Barbier’s wife. Bredt and Pitt identified apparent methodological problems in six of Wang’s published papers. (Other scientists have since found problems in another twenty.)
Südhof told me that the data in the papers…
