Thank the scientists and the mice.

Yesterday scientist announced that a skin cancer drug was showing surprising reversal effects on mice with induced Alzheimer’s disease.

            The drug, called bexarotene, has been on the market for about 10 years to treat T-cell lymphoma, often after other treatments have failed. But bexarotene can do a completely different job in the brain, researchers report online February 9 in Science.

                  “This is a pretty fantastic drug,” says Paige Cramer of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, coauthor of the new study, which used bexarotene to treat mice suffering from an Alzheimer’s-like condition.

                  “Nothing tested comes anywhere close to the speed with which existing amyloid  the underlying  plaque believed to cause Alzheimer’s conditions - editor notes) is washed away by this drug,” says neurologist  and neuroscientist Samuel Gandy of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.¹

This is huge. As my friend, Stephen Woodfin, a fellow author and one who has studied this disease a lot, written about it and cared for a loved one with it, can vouch for, Alzheimer’s robs not only the victim of dignity, but the care-givers and family members of hope. And to have the prospect for a cure is a real finger-crosser. In Woodfin’s novel, The Sickle’s Compass, Woody Wilson is the center of a manhunt. And the clock is ticking. Woody suffers from the ravages of Alzheimer’s. In his world, as in the world of other sufferers, time and memory are jumbled to the point of not knowing the here and now from the then and gone.  The slim chance that a cure is near, would make even this fictional character of Woodfin’s stand up on the printed page and shout out in victory. As we should.

It will take years in trials, to be sure, for the drug to make it to market with this indicated usage.. But the mere thought that we might have tripped up and accidentally found a cure to this dreaded ailment is a huge ray of light in a dark world.

Science moves at incredible speed on some fronts, and painstakingly slowly on others.  News stories of breakthroughs often lead to disappointments and dead ends.  And this one, too might prove to be a false step, but signs are promising and that is all we can go on at this time: that and hope and faith that this scientific finding is the real thing.

Families who face this horrible disease have little time. Yet, it is time that science needs to prove its research over and over and to make sure side effects are not dangerous. My only hope, is that should we be close, the FDA does not step in the way of a possible cure, and slow the process down with bureaucratic red tape. They have been known to drag their feet at times, when it was not necessary.

Science marches on for us. And we should be grateful.  But another cloud passes over me as I write this, in that in our country today, there is an anti-intellectual mood in swing – anti-science, to be exact. I fear that other discoveries and other frontiers will be lost, if this movement of thought is fostered in any way.

Way back in the 1970’s I took a class at the University of Texas where a professor warned us about the growing menace of people with every increasingly loud voices in society, putting logic, reason and science down. Anti-intellectualism, he called it.  I scoffed. Not in America.  Not in my country.

But in 2012, unfortunately it is true. One only has to read the newspapers, the science journals and listen to the stump speeches of candidates on the extreme right fringes of political parties, to hear the undercurrents of this thinking. I used to joke with my children who attended a Christian private school that the science they were learning couldn’t be the whole science, because in their school the world was only 6,000 years old. The reality is, there is so much creationism trying to wiggle its way into mainstream education today, that I fear the joke is no longer a joke, but a threat.

Our leading scientists tell us there is global warming (climate change is the new moniker) and the mouth-pieces for the fossil-fuel, carbon-based industries mock them and their science. It’s almost as if it is okay to call the smartest people in the room “egg-heads” and leave it at that. “Who cares what the egg-heads have to say. We know what’s real. Theirs is just book learning. And not from the Good Book either.”

Let us hope that science, reason and logic will prevail. And we can continue to keep fostering breakthroughs like the one announced by the scientists. Yesterday we may have cured Alzheimer’s.  We can surely hope.  But tomorrow, we must reach for other cures, for other dreaded diseases –diseases and disorders that been around far longer than 6,000 years.

¹ Taken from article in Science News published February 9, 2012.