About this item
The riveting account of a community from the remote mountains of Colombia whose rare and fatal genetic mutation is unlocking the secrets of Alzheimer's disease. In the 1980s, a neurologist named Francisco Lopera traveled on horseback into the mountains seeking families with symptoms of dementia. For centuries, residents of certain villages near Medellín had suffered memory loss as they reached middle age, going on to die in their fifties. Lopera discovered that a unique genetic mutation was causing their rare hereditary form of early onset Alzheimer's disease. Over the next forty years of working with the "paisa mutation" kindred, he went on to build a world-class research program in a region beset by violence and poverty.. In Valley of Forgetting, Jennie Erin Smith brings readers into the clinic, the laboratories, and the Medellín trial center where Lopera's patients receive an experimental drug to see if Alzheimer's can be averted.
About the Author
Jennie Erin Smith's work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the Wall Street Journal, McSweeney's, Byliner, and The New Yorker. She is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Award, a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., two first-place awards from the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, and the Waldo Proffitt Award for Environmental Journalism. She lives in Central America.
