Wendell's Response to Interveiw

I was pleasantly surprised by what we learned. Dr. Sturgil doesn’t do direct work with Alzheimer’s, but he was able to give a different perspective of it and shed light on things that we hadn’t found or heard about as in debt. I knew that Alzheimer’s is hereditary, but I didn’t link that to being on a chromosome, which makes it a little scarier since I have Alzheimer’s and dementia in my family. We learned that the earliest sign of Alzheimer’s was in someone who was twenty-nine, which was disturbing to all of us. From pictures it appeared as if the entire brain was under attack and that every part suffered from degeneration. We learned that there different types of cells of the brain and that the occipital lobe of the brain isn’t affected; which lead us to question why not Initially it was shocking to find that fetal cells used to combat the tau proteins were no match, however, I just read a paper that seemed to suggest that mutating tau would probably be a better solution,… though the side effects could be worse. The heritability, the fact that it is on chromosome 17, and the fact that everyone doesn’t have it, shows that it doesn’t deal with fitness because the symptoms occur after reproductive age. It must have been a mutation that occurred that has been passed down.

<http://www.pnas.org/content/96/10/5598.full.pdf>

Mara’s Interview Response

1. Describe your feelings about or response to the interview.
I feel like the interview went fairly well. I was really interested in what Dr. Sturgill knew about Alzheimer's. I was really surprised to learn that eye sight is unaffected by Alzheimer's.

2. What changes occurred for you as a result of your interview?
I had a better understanding and different perspective of the topic.

3. Did anything about it disturb you?
I didn't find anything disturbing.

4. Describe the connections you found between the interview and your research/classwork.
Individuals who develop early on-set Alzheimer’s have an inherited predisposition to develop the disease; it is the result of a heritable mutation. Dr. Sturgill believes that other animals are probably susceptible to neurodegenerative diseases.