One neglected issue here is the role of government funding agencies and universities in controlling who gets funded. It's common practice for universities to encourage their own researchers to get government positions at funding agencies, where they can help shepherd grants back to their parent institutions, for example. Something like this seems to have gone on with Alzheimer's funding - some people involved with the source lab ended up directing funding at the federal level.

So, if you're a researcher who decides to publish refutation of a fundamental claim by the leading stars in the field, you risk getting on a funding blacklist, and your grant review doesn't get approved. Hence, the safer thing to do is simply ignore the research you suspect to be fraudulent and take your own research in a different direction. There's also the concept that they don't want to discredit the entire field by exposing fraud and thereby risk Congress spiking the funding entirely or something like that.

Incidentally, a lot of the silence on the very plausible notion that Sars-CoV2 escaped from a lab, and that its transmissibiliy and virulence likely were increased in the lab as a consequence of various gain-of-function (well-meaning I suppose) research techniques (serial passage, CRISPR engineering, etc.), appears to be due to similar concerns (i.e. researcher who even discuss the possiblity might run afoul of people like Fauci and cohort who still control virology research funding).

Sadly it is the very reasonable assumption that is wrong: important findings often do not get replicated. Usually the setup and execution (even working from great notes) is long and difficult, and often involves something specialized like trans-genetic mice (engineered for experimenting on this specific thing). And the benefits for being the lab that successfully repeats an experiment are approaching 0, and because there are so many thing that could go wrong a failure to replicate is not often a slam-dunk repudiation.

So there is little incentive for people to do this. This should probably be fixed, maybe with some right-of-passage for Post-Docs being assigned to replicate important works, with explicit funding from the NIH (or someone) earmarked for this as a sort of training budget.

> You'd think there'd be some similar studies done of the original result but that doesn't seem to have been the case or this fraud would've been discovered already.

As Derek Lowe says, this did happen:

> I could be wrong about this, but from this vantage point the original Lesné paper and its numerous follow-ups have largely just given people in the field something to point at when asked about the evidence for amyloid oligomers directly affecting memory. I’m not sure how many groups tried to replicate the findings, although (as just mentioned) when people did it looks like they indeed couldn’t find the 56 oligomer. And judging from the number of faked Westerns, that’s probably because it doesn’t exist in the first place. But my impression is that a lot of labs that were interested in the general idea of beta-amyloid oligomers just took the earlier papers as validation for that interest, and kept on doing their own research into the area without really jumping directly onto the 56 story itself. The bewildering nature of the amyloid-oligomer situation in live cells has given everyone plenty of opportunities for that! The expressions in the literature about the failure to find *56 (as in the Selkoe lab’s papers) did not de-validate the general idea for anyone - indeed, Selkoe’s lab has been working on amyloid oligomers the whole time and continues to do so. Just not Lesné’s oligomer.

In other words, the result was tried to be replicated a few times, and no one could replicate it. But the groups working in this space were already pursuing similar paths before this paper, and the results were taken not as a "target this one specific thing and you'll be golden" but rather "here's more evidence that targeting this class of thing is useful in this place."

I'll also point out that by the time you're talking dosage questions, you're generally tackling clinical trials (phase II trials are meant to establish the dosing regime), which is far downstream of work that gets published academically.