Charles Piller

The full title of Piller's book is Doctored, Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer's.

Charles Piller has been a journalist pretty much his entire adult life.

Pillar is 71 years old.

Before coming to Science Magazine, he wrote for the LA Times, the Sacramento Bee, and the life sciences news outlet, Stat.

For the past several years, his reporting has been focused on Alzheimer's research.

I asked him why.

What is the thinking on potential environmental drivers of Alzheimer's disease?

To what degree would that be caused by less or worse medical care itself?

In other words, how much advantage is there to

early or constant monitoring and then whatever kind of treatment there may be?

Or are you saying that low-income people may have in their lives drivers that are responsible for Alzheimer's?

Okay, so that was Charles Piller on a few potential drivers of Alzheimer's.

So how does the disease itself work?

For that, we need a neuroscientist.

Describe for me how much of your work is...

what a layperson like me might consider Alzheimer's-related?

So just walk me through quickly all the schools you attended and all the degrees you got.

Were you wanting to be this kind of scientist since the time you were a kid?

Did your family or school or background encourage you?

The lab that Schrag got shuttled to was run by a neuropharmacologist named Othman Grebe, who studied Alzheimer's.