Since the
city’s founding in 1630, Boston has tended to have a healthy self-regard for
itself. The first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Puritan leader
John Winthrop, quoted scripture from the book of Matthew: “You are the light of
the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.” Boston, of course, played a
seminal role in the Revolutionary War, and a half-century later the city had
acquired the moniker the “Athens of America” for its high-brow culture. In the
decades leading to the Civil War, Boston was a hotbed of abolitionists. And long
after it became clear that New York was the nation’s dominant city, Boston continued
the facetious conceit, coined by Oliver Wendell Holmes, that Boston was the
“Hub of the Universe.” Yet by the 1920s, the city was somewhat of a backwater,
and it wasn’t until several decades later that Boston and Cambridge began to
benefit from the very bright men and women who were educated at MIT, Harvard and
other area colleges and universities.
These days, the Boston area is a mecca for medical
research and drug development, including neurological diseases, Alzheimer’s
among them. Boston Globe reporter
Robert Weisman, who specializes in health care and biotechnology, noted that
Boston recently hosted more than 10,000 scientists and doctors in a convention
devoted to neurological disorders. One is Cambridge-based Biogen, among the oldest
and largest biotech companies.
At the other end of the spectrum, the startup Alzheon,
based in Framingham, about twenty miles west of Boston, this week announced a
breakthrough. Its press release declared, “Alzheon Scientists Discover Novel
Therapeutic Mechanism of Inhibition of Formation of Toxic Beta Amyloid
Oligomers, Key Driver of Alzheimer’s Disease Pathogenesis.” If you have little
idea what oligomers are, join the club. The gist of the press release is that
Alzheon researchers believe they have a fresh slant to combat amyloid plaque,
one of the two major components of Alzheimer’s. (The other is tau, which
manifests itself as tangles.)
Weisman, the Globe reporter, quoted Paul Bolno, who previously
worked for GlaxoSmithKlein. “The biotechs are moving the science forward.…There
was a mass exodus of pharma companies like ours. The large companies are now on
the sidelines trying to get back in.” Is it likely that Alzeon will receive
significant backing? I would assume so. The closest we’ve come to something resembling
a breakthrough was this past October, when clinical trials suggested, that Ely
Lilly’s drug candidate was capable of slowing down the pace of Alzheimer’s.
There was no expectation that Ely Lilly could stop Alzheimer’s in its tracks,
but slowing down the disease would have been a singular accomplishment in
itself.
Should my cohorts and I accept the likelihood that our
generation of people with early-onset Alzheimer’s will not be saved by some
wonder drug? The odds of any of us who already are manifesting symptoms of the
disease are not particularly encouraging, but we live in an era in which
researchers are much more informed about the powers of the brain, and just
being persistently optimistic may be a decent stratagem to maximize one’s years
of cogency. I’ve never read Norman Vincent Peale, the author of The Power of Positive Thinking, but I
often think of my dad, a relentlessly resilient soul, who, despite setbacks in
his dual careers of commercial fisherman and schoolteacher, never seemed to get
him down for long—not even on his death bed. His last, wan quip, just a day or
so before he died: Not good news when the
priest shows up!