TRUST THE SCIENCE! BUT MAYBE NOT THE SCIENTISTS. RealClearInvestigations: Famed Alzheimer’s Researcher John Hardy Is a Knight … but Not in Shining Armor.

The celebrated Alzheimer’s Disease researcher John Hardy was among the British doctors and medical researchers honored by Queen Elizabeth II with knighthoods at the dawn of the new year. It was just the latest on a long list of prestigious awards Hardy has collected, including the Potamkin Prize for his work identifying genetic aspects of Alzheimer’s disease, the MetLife Prize, the Thudichum medal, the Robert A. Pritzker Prize, and the Breakthrough Prize.

In 2018, Hardy added the Brain Prize to his list of accolades. Awarded by the Danish Lundbeck Foundation, it is regularly referred to as the “Nobel of neuroscience.” Winners are assumed to be on the short list for the Nobels themselves.

Missing among all the flattering kudos and attendant news coverage has been any mention of the geneticist’s leading role in a conspiracy that held Alzheimer’s research hostage to fraudulently acquired gene patents. The sordid affair mired efforts to find a cure in tangled, resource-sapping litigation. The last of the courthouse wrangling that began in 2003 wouldn’t be resolved for more than a decade – a resolution that came with a ringing rebuke from the bench expressing the judge’s outrage at the scheme, the schemers, and the damage they caused.

Yet until now the full details of the deceptions of Hardy and his accomplices have not been widely reported. Some of them are consigned to scholarly literature and other startling ones are found in overlooked testimony from the prolonged litigation, which documents one of the most celebrated scientists of our time admitting under oath that he lied and committed academic fraud, and confessing that he was ashamed.

The story – which also ensnared one of the world’s most prominent woman scientists, who admitted under oath that she too lied, pressured by Hardy – emerges at a time when the credibility of august scientific authorities is being sorely challenged on other fronts, not least during the coronavirus pandemic.

Scientists are humans, and are just as prone to selfishness and dishonesty as anyone else.