Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to extract cerebral spinal fluid — “liquid gold,” a research nurse called it for the valuable biological information it contains. Then, the nurse took a sample of his skin cells. After that came an injection of a radioactive tracer followed by a brain scan requiring him to lie still for 30 minutes with a thermoplastic mask over his face. Then, another tracer injection and another brain scan.
During his three-day visit to the center, at Washington University in St. Louis, he also had cognitive assessments, neurological evaluations and blood draws that extracted multiple tubes for analysis.
For 14 years now, Mr. Whitney has been the one-person focus of exceptionally detailed scientific investigation, for which he travels periodically to St. Louis from his home in Port Orchard, Wash. It is not because he is ill. It is because he was supposed to be ill.
Mr. Whitney, 76, is a scientific unicorn with potential to provide answers about one of the world’s most devastating diseases. He has a rare genetic mutation that essentially guaranteed he would develop Alzheimer’s disease in his late 40s or early 50s and would likely die within a decade.
His mother and nine of her 13 siblings developed Alzheimer’s and died in the prime of their lives. So did his oldest brother, and other relatives going back generations. It is the largest family in the United States known to have an Alzheimer’s-causing mutation.
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The post He Was Expected to Get Alzheimer’s 25 Years Ago. Why Hasn’t He? appeared first on New York Times.
