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

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: Looking for episode transcripts? Open our podcast on the Apple Podcasts app (desktop or mobile) or the Spotify mobile app to access an auto-generated transcript of any episode. Closed captioning is also available for every episode on our YouTube channel. Contact us: Have a question about something you heard? Looking for a transcript? Want to suggest a topic or guest? Contact us via email or visit our website. Follow us: @‌PublicHealthPod on Bluesky @‌JohnsHopkinsSPH on Instagram @‌JohnsHopkinsSPH on Facebook @‌PublicHealthOnCall on YouTube Here's our RSS feed Note: These podcasts are a conversation between the participants, and do not represent the position of Johns Hopkins University.