Season 12 • Episode 922

922 - Book Club—Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer's Families and the Search for a Cure

Jul 23, 2025

23:41

Genetics & Genomics Alzheimer's Rare Disease Neurology Public Health

Episode Description

About this episode:

In the 1980s, Colombian neurologist Francisco Lopera discovered a rare genetic mutation afflicting residents of a village outside Medellín that could hold the key to understanding and treating Alzheimer's disease. In this episode: Author Jennie Erin Smith talks about her new book Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer's Families and the Search for a Cure and how families in the Paisa region of Colombia have forever changed the study of neurodegenerative diseases.

Guest:

Jennie Erin Smith is an author and a regular contributor for The New York Times, whose work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, and more.

Host:

Lindsay Smith Rogers, MA, is the producer of the Public Health On Call podcast, an editor for Expert Insights, and the director of content strategy for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Show links and related content:

Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer's Families and the Search for a Cure—Penguin Random House
A Different Way to Think About Medicine's Most Stubborn Enigma—The Atlantic
The 'Country Doctor' Who Upended Our Understanding of Dementia—New York Times

Transcript information:

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