Decoding Darkness

Ann Parson . Science Writer | home

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Decoding Darkness; The Search for the Genetic Causes of Alzheimer's Disease

Co-authored with Ruolph E. Tanzi, Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School

Reviews

Perseus Books

"Remember this book. Tanzi and Parson have made a complicated science come to life.... It is, in all the best ways, a human account of one of the most important scientific missions of our time."

--Newsday

"One of the best things about Decoding Darkness is that it never loses itself in the chemistry."

-- The Economist

"This is a gripping book with a vast amount of fascinating information."

-- Booklist

"A scientific autobiography written with a journalist can be a winner, as illustrated by Decoding Darkness....The story is invigorating, the progress is fantastic, and the writing is lively."

-- The New England Journal of Medicine

"[A] fascinating story -- part mystery, part scientific treatise, and part autobiography.... [This] tale is not just another sterile account of scientific discovery."

-- Publishers Weekly

"Decoding Darkness captures the excitement of the hunt that has played out in the past 15 years and recounts what is certainly one of the great success stories in biomedical research."

-- Nature Genetics

Excerpt

Chapter One: Cleave, Zap, Blot, Probe

At twenty-one and fresh out of college, I entrusted myself, as I still do, to the Taoist philosophy that the less you interfere in Nature's course, the more likely your life will find its true path. This wisdom flowed from a slip of a book I'd discovered in high school -- the "Tao Te Ching." In retrospect, it would seem that giving myself up to "the way of things" succeeded, because that fall an opportunity of a lifetime presented itself pretty much out-of-the-blue, one that introduced me to a spectacular new scientific method and later prompted my investigation into the genetic wrongs of Alzheimer's disease.

It was a cloudy September Saturday in 1980, and after the quiet of summer, Boston seemed energized by autumn's return. Beacon Hill's narrow streets were clogged with cars, its crooked- brick walks filled with residents and students, who, with summer extinguished, seemed all business. On the Charles River even the sailboats crossing the watery line between Boston and Cambridge flew forward at a clip. A few blocks east on Blossom Street, which curves behind the Massachusetts General Hospital, members of the rock band "Fantasy" and I moved more like laden barges. Sleep deprived and hung over from the previous night's fling, we nonetheless managed with an elevator's aid to move the band's musical equipment into the Flying Machine, the nightspot atop the Holiday Inn that attracted everyone from visiting Portuguese sailors to the occasional Brahmin.

Four months earlier, in May of 1980, the University of Rochester had sent me into the world with what I hoped would be sufficient padding -- bachelor degrees in both history and microbiology. The one, Time Past, had filled me with an indelible impression of the patterns and trends that span recorded centuries. The other, Emergings of Time Future, had left me startled by the Phoenix soaring out of the present -- the molecular-genetics revolution. Biology's horizon was filled with elaborate possibilities far beyond the imaginings of such tour-de-force microbe hunters as Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and Paul Ehrlich.

In the course of my history studies, I'd devoured Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and taken away his valuable model. One set of beliefs ascends over time, then falls under the weight of a crisis, which inevitably ushers in yet another belief system that rises and similarly collapses, and so on, until there's a sense, as from a wave rolling forward, that you can extrapolate the nature of the next crisis and the new visions it will unfold. Now a scientist, I'm even more aware that the models we put our faith in are mostly wrong. Some day they will be as outmoded as the idea, imagined by Franz Mesmer in the 18th Century, about how to relieve people of disease. Stand them across from healthy folk in a tub of water, have both groups grasp a long metal chain, and let the positive forces of animal magnetism flow from the healthy into the infirmed, miraculously curing them. For scientific revolutions to take flight, current theories have to be questioned, the status quo disrupted. Since my years at Rochester, I've always wanted to induce the next crisis, inspire the next paradigm shift. This is the challenge of science -- to shed dogma and get closer to the truth.

But scientific revolutions were the furthest thing from my mind that Saturday atop the Holiday Inn. I was in the throes of a post-college existentialist crisis. Why did I exist? What was life? Living life as a bushy-haired, scruffy musician and playing keyboard once again with my musician friends from high-school days seemed the best way of regaining some sort of perspective. When I was ten, my Uncle John had let me fold and unfold the huge red accordion he played in old-age centers around our hometown of Cranston, Rhode Island, and from there on in I'd been glued to the keys of pianos, electric organs, and synthesizers. Blues, jazz, rock, techno, punk, improv, some classical. One form fed another. I'd come to realize that when I played music on a daily basis -- even on an informal basis, as I had throughout college -- life was always better. When I didn't, disaster struck.