I only recently read David Shenk's great popular science book from 2001, The Forgetting, which is a "biography" of Alzheimer's disease. It tells its story on many levels, from the personal sufferings of caregivers and patients to the impacts on society as a whole. A main method of Shenk is his interviews with patients at different stages of the disease, which he mixes with vivid accounts of how the disease has ravaged people throughout history (he primarily describes the illnesses of Emerson and Swift). He also discusses the ethics and politics of research and (potential) treatments, and gives a summary of the scientific development from Alois Alzheimer's discoveries in the early 20th century to the "latest" reports from conferences in the beginning of this century.

Unfortunately, although the book is more than 10 years old, the scientific part is not particularly out-of-date. Although tens of thousands scientific papers have been published on Alzheimer's since the book was written, there have been few major breakthroughs. In particular, there is still no cure for the disease, despite the hopefulness that characterized the field on the time of Shenk's writing, when the first anti-amyloid treatments were being tested in humans. More than ten years later, and after several failed drug trials, we are slightly disillusioned. I suspect that Shenk would have emphasized even more the importance of acceptance, coping, and disease rehabilitation, if he had written the book today. However, a new generation of trials are now underway, aimed specifically at people with strong genetic risk factors. In a few years we will have much better data to determine if these classes of drugs - and with them the amyloid research paradigm - are successful at halting Alzheimer's disease.