How an outsider in Alzheimer’s research bucked the prevailing theory — and clawed for validation

Robert Moir was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. The Massachusetts General Hospital neurobiologist had applied for government funding for his Alzheimer’s disease research and received wildly disparate comments from the scientists tapped to assess his proposal’s merits.

It was an “unorthodox hypothesis” that might “fill flagrant knowledge gaps,” wrote one reviewer, but another said the planned work might add little “to what is currently known.” A third complained that although Moir wanted to study whether microbes might be involved in causing Alzheimer’s, no one had proved that was the case.

As if scientists are supposed to study only what’s already known, an exasperated Moir thought when he read the reviews two years ago.

He’d just had a paper published in a leading journal, providing strong data for his idea that beta-amyloid, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease, might be a response to microbes in the brain. If true, the finding would open up vastly different possibilities for therapy than the types of compounds virtually everyone else was pursuing.

But the inconsistent evaluations doomed Moir’s chances of winning the $250,000 a year for five years that he was requesting from the National Institutes of Health. While two reviewers rated his application highly, the third gave him scores in the cellar. Funding rejected.

Complaints about being denied NIH funding are as common among biomedical researchers as spilled test tubes after a Saturday night lab kegger. The budgets of NIH institutes that fund Alzheimer’s research at universities and medical centers cover only the top 18 percent or so of applications. There are more worthy studies than money.

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Moir’s experience is notable, however, because it shows that, even as one potential Alzheimer’s drug after another (the last such drug, Namenda, was approved in 2003), researchers with fresh approaches — and sound data to back them up — have struggled to get funded and to get studies published in top journals. Many scientists in the NIH “study sections” that evaluate grant applications, and