Reisa Sperling, one of the world’s foremost researchers of Alzheimer’s disease, was vacationing at Lake Tahoe with her family in 2008 when she noticed her father was behaving strangely.
“Where’s your mother?” he would ask, disoriented. “What are we doing here?”
At first, Sperling thought her dad, a 74-year-old chemistry professor, might simply be tired. Perhaps the altitude had affected him. And then she had a terrible thought: He was acting just like her grandfather — his own father — who had died of Alzheimer’s in 1993.
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