senior author of the article was the person who established that prions are a legitimate disease caused by protein folding he had to fight an uphill battle for over 20 years to get his ideas established so I'm going to actually give him a ton of credit and the ability to publish what he wants to because he's already demonstrated he's responsible. He also won the Nobel prize for that work.
You could modify your belief in his authority based on the fact that this result was presumably rejected by top-tier journals, and probably for non-trivial reasons. I don't know anything about the field so I can't say whether that's appropriate here. But if you're willing to grant credence based on a prior Nobel, you should be willing to consider taking some away based on the publishing journal's reputation. Why wouldn't a top-tier journal want to publish a Nobel winner's Alzheimer's breakthrough?
Where did you get the idea his work was rejected? Also, his work was rejected by top journals for decades until people finally realized he was correct.
If it could have been published in Science, then it wouldn't have been submitted to Science Translational Medicine, a completely different journal with much less visibility (and a much lower impact factor). For some of these Nobel guys you could argue they want to avoid supporting the flashy magazines and don't care about getting into the high impact journals because they are already established, but in this case he actually submitted to a Science-family journal, so he's very unlikely to be making some principled stand.
Yes, it's speculative. But so is the idea that this work is correct because he won a Nobel in the past. That's the point: you're making guesses based on limited evidence, and we're pointing out that you didn't use all available limited evidence to influence your guess, just some evidence that confirmed what you already felt. This is a kind of bias.
> There may be good reasons why it didn't show in Science (page space is extremely limited)
Um, exactly? Science is the most visible journal after Nature, so it's the most competitive. "Insufficient page space" is exactly the same as "not impressive enough to be accepted".
