A groundbreaking scientific study published in 2006 has been one of the main focuses for treating Alzheimer’s disease ever since. You’ve probably even heard about it on the news. The prevailing theory is that sticky plaque buildup in the brain from amyloid beta proteins causes Alzheimer’s. The scientific community has now been rocked by allegations that the images used for the study were completely fake.

The supposedly groundbreaking research was first published in the journal Nature. University of Minnesota neuroscientist and associate professor Sylvain Lesné was the lead author of the study. Neuroscientists at Vanderbilt University are now claiming that Lesné doctored the images used in his study, and the results cannot be replicated.

The study claimed to definitively identify a specific amyloid beta protein as the cause of Alzheimer’s in rats. Scientists at multiple universities have now examined the original study and say that the images of the rats’ brains used by Lesné appear to be amateurish “copy-and-paste” jobs to make composite pictures.

The study made such a huge impact on the Alzheimer’s research community that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has spent nearly $1 billion in taxpayer money to conduct additional studies into amyloid beta proteins. A neurobiology professor at the University of Pittsburgh Brain Institute says the findings that the evidence was fabricated are “really bad for science.”

Well, yeah.

Professor Lesné has refused to return any phone calls from the media related to the scandal. Nature issued a publisher’s note that it was going to investigate the concerns about the research and publish a follow-up report. Dr. Karen Ashe, the co-author of the study at the University of Minnesota, has announced that she wants to retract the study entirely.

More than $1 billion in taxpayer money was wasted researching a potential Alzheimer’s culprit that might not even be real—all so a professor could get his paper published.