My (side) grant got funded! It's for Rett's syndrome, which isn't exactly Alzheimer's, but on my end it'll mean me following a very similar pipeline, except with Rett's in place of Alzheimer's mice.
I also had a somewhat embarrassing experience in class last week: I presented on a scientific paper for class, picked by a teacher who also happens to be the co-PI on afformentioned grant, my de facto neuro-minded advisor, and head of an institute.
We got to the end of the discussion and she asked me straight if I believed the authors' work. I hesitantly said yes... thinking that I didn't see any specific problems with the core hypothesis, which was supported by a decently-validated knockout mouse. As a class, we'd already discussed a few side issues at that point with regards to some of the biochemical methods, but it was hard to argue with the behavioral and imaging data.
Then she pointed out that the authors never checked if the cell type in question even expressed their gene of interest. And in fact other labs had checked from a few different angles and found an absence of signal in their data. And in fact I'd been at a group meeting in this PI's lab a year prior where they'd specifically pulled up these absence-of-signal figures and discussed their controversy, but hadn't latched on to that information because I was still in my in-over-my-head phase of barely understanding the gross types of questions people in neuroscience even like to go after.
So PI laughed at me, and I felt a bit dumb, and after they found me in their lab and shared a few more of their thoughts. And now I'm trying to re-organize my mental check-list of things to look for in papers before I believe their conclusions.
Anyways, here's some neurons: