922 - Book Club—Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer's Families and the Search for a Cure
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.8 • 620 Ratings
🗓️ 23 July 2025
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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:
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Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer’s Families and the Search for a Cure—Penguin Random House
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A Different Way to Think About Medicine’s Most Stubborn Enigma—The Atlantic
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The ‘Country Doctor’ Who Upended Our Understanding of Dementia—New York Times
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, |
| 0:05.9 | where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges. |
| 0:16.3 | If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh.h.u. |
| 0:22.7 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:30.6 | It's Lindsay Smith Rogers. Today, how a community in a remote part of Columbia has helped |
| 0:36.6 | advance our understanding of early-onset Alzheimer's. |
| 0:40.0 | I speak with Jenny Aaron Smith, author of the book Valley of Forgetting Alzheimer's Families and the Search for a Cure, about the PISA mutation, discovered in the 1980s among residents living in the mountains, and how a research program built with community members |
| 0:55.6 | there yielded so much information about this devastating disease. Let's listen. |
| 1:01.9 | Jenny Aaron Smith, thank you so much for joining us on public health on call. Why don't you start |
| 1:06.1 | out by telling us where you are? I am right now in Medellin, Colombia, which is the same site of the book |
| 1:13.5 | that I recently published and where I spent seven years looking into issues of early onset |
| 1:20.5 | Alzheimer's disease. The book that you're talking about is Valley of Forgetting Alzheimer's |
| 1:24.9 | families and The Search for a Cure. Could you tell us how this story |
| 1:29.6 | begins? Lindsay, this is actually a famous story, at least in the Alzheimer's research world, |
| 1:35.4 | but it's been covered a lot. The story is about a giant family of 6,000 people, many of whom |
| 1:42.6 | carry a mutation that causes early onset Alzheimer's disease |
| 1:46.3 | in their 40s. And the family was discovered by a Colombian neurologist in 1984. The neurologist's name |
| 1:55.2 | was Francisco Lopera. He went on to be quite famous in the United States and later in the |
| 2:00.6 | Alzheimer's research world in general. He was on to be quite famous in the United States and later in the Alzheimer's research world |
| 2:01.6 | in general. He was a young doctor when he sort of came upon this family. He had just finished |
| 2:08.7 | up his mandatory government service, which is where they send out in Colombia doctors to the |
| 2:14.7 | sticks in the jungles in their first year after medical school, wanting |
... |
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