The forgetting gene

page11-nature_logo

ONE day in 1991, neurologist Warren Strittmatter asked his boss to look at some bewildering data. Strittmatter was studying amyloid-β, the main component of the molecular clumps found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. He was hunting for amyloid-binding proteins in the fluid that buffers the brain and spinal cord, and had fished out one called apolipoprotein E (ApoE), which had no obvious connection with the disease…

This article was inspired by an Ernst Strüngmann forum on brain diseases in March 2014 and first published in Nature on 6 June 2014. To continue reading, click here.