阿茲海默症為何至今難解？諾獎得主聚德霍夫談大腦研究與科學取捨【與頂尖對話：諾貝爾獎得主系列】Ep.4｜廣編企劃

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]I'm trying not to be distracted, but I have to honestly admit that sometimes I am.

[00:00:05]And it is disconcerting how much time I lose by being distracted. So, it's not that I escaped this.

[00:00:17]What I'm trying to do to, however, be not as distracted as I would [music] otherwise be is to always reflect on my own personal priorities.

[00:00:30]So, the reflection involves the question, "What do I value?

[00:00:36]What is it really that I value? Do I value having a good meal? Do I value um watching a good movie? Do I value having a particular discovery, a an insight?"

[00:00:50]It really depends on I think everybody should ask themselves, herself or himself, "What is it that we as a person [music] what really enjoy and value? What do we believe in?" But always go back to what really are the values [music] that provide meaning to your life.

[00:01:14]It's very important in the sense that we can only do good work if we value what we do.

[00:01:21]I value what I do and that's in the end what really drives me cuz I believe in the value of what I do.

[00:01:35]>> [music] [music] >> I'm honored to invite Professor Shudo come to the stage.

[00:02:16]How much Sidhoff >> [music] [music] [music] >> My scientific view there is that Alzheimer's disease is possibly the most pressing biomedical problem. I do think that in our aging societies, in Taiwan as much as in >> [music] >> the United States, as in every world, dementia is an growing problem which will affect everybody's life. Just to give you numbers to the a third of all Americans above the age of 90 suffer from Alzheimer's disease. How can we prevent this?

[00:03:43]I don't have a solution to preventing it because we don't understand the diseases. These are diseases, they're not normal aging. In the absence of an understanding of the disease, despite a vast amount of data, large numbers of papers, any attempts to treat the disease are pure guesswork. We need to have excellent science directed towards understanding the disease in order to find ways of preventing it or slowing it down or delaying it.

[00:04:21]There are a lot of things one can do that are entertaining and distracting, but not very productive.

[00:04:30]Especially in our times where we have constant access to new information.

[00:04:39]This is actually bad because we as humans, our brains are wired to give preference to novelty.

[00:04:49]As humans, we always want novel things and the constant distractions we are invited participate in from our cell phones, emails, [music] whatever, TikTok, whatever you Yeah.

[00:05:02]Um they're always novel. Okay, so this is just continuous stream of novelty.

[00:05:07]I try to resist that as much as I can by making myself aware of it again and again.

[00:05:19]I think that from my personal experience, my conclusion is that we as a scientific community need to really pay attention to science integrity. The problem is not minor mistakes. What I do believe is a big deal in science integrity is the fact that we don't have functioning peer review system for journal publishing.

[00:05:48]We don't have a regulation of publishing and we lack often accountability of publishing.

[00:06:00]Accountability by the journals, by the editors, and sometimes by the peer reviewers. We need to have a more transparent system. There is a science integrity crisis. It's a structural integrity problem cuz we let scientific publishing slip out of our control. But that is also largely um conditioned by commercial and political interests.

[00:06:34]Scientifically, the most difficult decisions are always the decisions on what not to work on.

[00:06:43]The resources are always limited.

[00:06:47]So, you constantly need to make a decision of what not to do, not only what to do.

[00:06:52]Career-wise, I suppose the hardest decision to make for me was to move institutions.

[00:07:04]So, I moved from Germany to Texas. That was not an easy decision. I moved from Texas to [music] Stanford, which was also not an easy decision because the resources in Texas were much bigger. There's lots of money.

[00:07:19]But the scientific environment was much worse.

[00:07:22]Yeah. And so, um I think that that was professionally a very difficult decision.

[00:07:30]Um I think I made the right decision, but one will never know.

[00:07:37]So, there is no rational way of making decision like this.

[00:07:42]Like in personal life, at some point you just have to follow your intuition, your gut feeling because there is no objective way. There's no way this is better, this is [music] worse. Yeah.

[00:07:56]You have to basically follow your gut feeling and whenever you follow your gut feeling, I'm sure you have made the same experience in your life, you're never sure.

[00:08:06]Most recently I have decided to put more emphasis on studying Alzheimer's disease. That is not the disease [music] itself, but the most fundamental processes underlying the disease because I feel that it is a very important challenge we face.

[00:08:29]And that was a risk. I would encourage everybody, not only scientists, to embrace change.

[00:08:38]You know, even though it's risky.

[00:08:44]The biggest fear I have for the current generation of children is that they never learn how to actually do something from A to Z, really follow through on a project completely on their own with their own initiative without getting distracted. I fear that this constant distraction may make the mind unable to actually do something completely.

[00:09:16]I don't know if that fear is justified.

[00:09:19]We will see.

[00:09:36]>> [music] >> Mhm.

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[00:09:59]>> [music] >> Mhm.

[00:10:01]Mhm.

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