Alzheimer's is more and more increasingly becoming identified as "Type 3 Diabetes," so take that into consideration. Activities that would tend to help avoid or ameliorate T2 Diabetes (reasonable restriction of carbohydrates, especially concentrated carbohydrates) are likely to assist with T3 as well.

There is also some interesting research with administration of coconut oil in dementia. I am not saying there are any conclusions yet, but it appears that the research is looking good.

Apologies for not addressing the original question but the Alzheimer's topic is actually of more interest to me. My bad :-)

Great article. Thanks for posting.

The Federal Government has no business being in business. It has specific, enumerated powers and research isn't one of them. If the People want to pass an Amendment giving the government the ability to tax us and waste billions on their cronies doing research (put Alzheimers and HIV aside, lets talk about influenza!). This is just another National Science Institute.

Government screws up funding for research, just like it screws everything else up.Unless there is no cure for it, cancer should have been conquered last century. I suspect too much money is involved. When vast amounts of money flow toward a certain research it is hard to turn off the flow of dollars with a cure. Ask any Polio researcher.

I am unable to find that part of the Constitution authorizing the government to do any research in medicine. I guess Shaffer was right. "The Constitution is that sacred document which prevents the government from doing all the terrible things it does." ~~ Professor Butler Shaffer

Although I am funding my own biomedical research as a very wealthy man, there is no way in hell I would ever be able to afford to go through all the steps to get clinical trial approval from FDA. This is true even though my work should cut down dramatically on the number of animal and human subjects that would need to be tested.

Well said. But how to implement these ideas? To get rid of the FDA? To get the government out of people's lives?--I guess we must just slog ahead trying to convert people to Objectivism and free enterpise. And who knows how long that will take?---But I didn't know that the Soviet Union would collapse when it did. So maybe there is good hope.

I am funding my own biomedical research, as expensive as that is, in tissue engineering, precisely because I am not going to be Robert Stadler. If you want to fund entrepreneurial biomedical engineering education, I promise to provide value for value, and will explain more if you ask.

I can talk to you about Alzheimer's disease research. I have done some. My family has a strong history of Alzheimer's, so I am well motivated.

I won't comment on the specific issue of your post because I don't have the facts, and don't have the time to look into it right now. However, why does the government get into funding these things anyway? My guess is because they have this excess money that they get from us and have a need to spend it so they can get some more.

Ayn covered this nicely in Atlas....

Great to see such a robust, intelligent discussion of these issues. I really appreciate it. I am going to read them again, now. I lot to learn.

There will be no cure found for Alzheimer's, cancer, no discovery of the cause of autism (while half the children born 14 years from now will end up with it - 85% of the boys). Nothing good will come from this mess. They lie. They cover up. They take the money and keep doing the same. Solutions will not be tolerated.

Alzheimer's killed my mother and it was very slow and very ugly up until her very last stroke. By then she rarely knew where she was at.
Makes a 70-year-old dino wonder if he shall receive a diagnosis of the same certain very ugly death.
Contracting AIDs? Our former president may have lit up the White House with rainbow lights,
but save for a rare accidental contamination, contracting AIDs is knida like contracting lung cancer due to smoking, another life style choice.
As far as I know, you can't get Alzheimer's by putting something inside you, though rresearch may some day prove otherwise.
Who knows?

Thanks, Walter. The broad thesis is easy to agree with. "Force and freedom cannot compete." Power and market are mutually exclusive. So, every political decision must be economically inefficient. We accept that axiomtically and I would be open to any empirical evidence to the contrary.

That said, it remains that government funding of scientific research has a justification. As you said: "Force has a valid role protecting us against all criminals, domestic and foreign, who would harm us." It was World War II that convinced the federal government - as argued well by Vannevar Bush - that there is no telling what lines of research will have military benefits. Certainly, in 1923 no one was thinking of atomic bombs delivered by rockets. It was not even science fiction. So, the government should fund all the research it can afford. And the only way we know to judge what has potential and what does not is to accept the judgments our best academics.

A contrary argument would be to rely totally on the spontaneous order of the free market. No market justiifcation existed for the atomic bomb project. The Nazi Germans, the USSR, the Japanese, all were incapable of it and we, the free peoples, had no need for it. People wonder why Gen. Dwight Eisenhower wore five stars. It was because of his analysis of the military industrial capacity of the belligerents. The free market works.

But it works because it is multi-valued. In other words, no one actor decides broadly for many other actors. Each individual, each business, each household decides by their own standards. Among the benefits of that is the diffusion of cupidity. As you said: "The first scientists working on a disease entity, and publishing peer-reviewed results, were chosen, of course, to sit on the NIH and other government panels (“study sections”) to recommend grant funding. They tended to recommend proposals pursuing the line of research that had made their reputation, not lines of research that might challenge or overturn their work."

The free market does not prevent that. We know that. Corporate boards make bad decisions because individuals err. Then everyone goes along. Call it "group think" - a warning label launched in Fortune magazine. I see it as the "Abiliene Vacation." No one wanted to goto Abiliene, but they each thought that the others did. It is not just evil Nazis and evil Communists who fall into line. Peter Keating was a heck of a nice guy.

Objectivism is better. It is not so much the epistemology and aesthetics and politics, though those are the expressions. The essential is the sense of life. Ayn Rand's fiction - Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged - influenced many millions more than actually adhere to the specifics of the formal philosophy. The power of Objectivism rests on Ayn Rand's aesthetic appeal to people of independent judgement.

So, for every corprorate board grouply thinking that there is no money in this research or that, we have a person somewhere who thinks that the money is not as important as achieving the goals of discovery and invention.

We make a big deal out of capitalism. No system seems better. But it can be said that capitalism is not a "system" but the absence of system. It is spontaneous order.

As for Alzheimer's you are wrong because you are relying on the wrong experts. "For Alzheimer’s, there is no treatment, no cure, no prevention. If you are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and ask, “What can be done for me?” the answer, in bluntest terms, is: “Nothing.” . I think that if you open the question here, you will find a lot of answers: the right food, the right lifestyle; nutrition, supplements, exercise, brain games... And for all of that, perhaps the best professor I had died of it, despite food, exercise, and lifetime of brain games. Entropy kills. And there ain't no cure for that. (... or maybe there is...)