In Pursuit of Memory by Joseph Jebelli

Author:Joseph Jebelli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Health & Fitness / Diseases / Alzheimer'S & Dementia, Medical / History, History / Social History
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2017-10-31T04:00:00+00:00

This is all too late for Victoria, of course. But she’s accepted that with remarkable resilience and unwavering altruism. ‘I know what’s going to happen… but there’s nothing I can… do… about it…’ Eight months had passed since my first visit and she was unmistakably worse: less animated, more introverted, she strained to vocalise her thoughts. ‘So I just hope… they find something… for somebody else.’ Her memory had taken a nose-dive, said Martin. She now forgot what she was doing from one moment to the next. Times, dates and day-to-day norms like shopping or going for walks were fast becoming incomprehensible. One day, Martin found that she’d unwittingly put cutlery in the bin; on another, he observed her hysterically searching for her phone while holding it in her hand all along. Martin, now a bulwark of patience and fortitude, has adapted; he’s ‘just been getting on with it’, he said.

Given Victoria’s condition, I was amazed to hear that she’d recently resumed her old job. Every few weeks she’s taken to see an old friend, called Iris, who suffers from Alzheimer’s herself. Victoria met Iris more than a decade ago, when she worked as a carer. She’d nursed Iris’s daughter, who had Down’s syndrome, and was now doing what little she could to see Iris, a ninety-one-year-old, through the final stages of a fate she knows awaits her too. She told me that she was bored at home; that she wanted to keep her mind active. ‘I’ve always been in the caring game,’ she said proudly, ‘but… of course… I’m know I can’t make… any mistakes… and I…’ She trailed off and Martin filled in the blanks. For him, the undertaking was not so much to keep Victoria occupied as it was to give her some company while he’s at work. His intuition is well founded: studies show that staying socially active can relieve anxiety and depression in dementia.

Wanting to offer something, anything, I relayed some of the dazzling work being done using her cells in the lab–impossible were it not for Victoria’s contribution. I still found it hard to digest the knowledge that while Victoria’s mind slowly deconstructs, it was quietly being reconstructed under the nose of Wray and other scientists, creating a portal to somewhere no brain scan can go. It’s hard to say when expectation will meet reality for iPS cells. There is a huge element of luck in biological research. Take Louis Pasteur, the French pioneer of vaccination. His discovery of the chicken cholera vaccine only occurred when he abandoned the experiment out of frustration and took a vacation, returning to discover that leaving the broth was precisely what was necessary to ‘attenuate’, or weaken, the bacteria enough for it to become a vaccine. This kind of thing happens all the time in modern laboratories. It comes from the sheer lawlessness of biology, the ‘most lawless of the three basic sciences’, wrote cancer biologist Siddhartha Mukherjee. ‘There are few rules to begin with, and even fewer rules that are universal.

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