13 Feb 2007

Even as Alzheimer researchers are still mourning the sudden death of Leon Thal, news reached the ARF editors that the field has lost two more formidable physician-scientists in the past month. We have created tribute pages for Leonard Berg and Cliff Shults, and invite all who knew them to share their memories by sending in comments and photos.

Leonard Berg died of a stroke last month, at age 79. Berg was a lion of AD research, who continued to be the target of his colleagues’ affection and admiration long after his retirement. In the 1970s, he started focusing on dementia, initially as a private practitioner, and later went on to initiate the Memory and Aging Project at the Washington University Alzheimer Disease Research Center in St. Louis, Missouri. This natural history study has been running for nearly 30 years, and has contributed greatly to improving the diagnosis of AD at early stages. In 1997, when after 22 years of directing the WashU ADRC, Berg handed over the reins to John Morris, Berg’s colleagues began celebrating his legacy with a symposium held every other September. Abstract submission for the 6th Leonard Berg Symposium is ongoing. For more on Berg, see WashU news story and profile.

Only four days after Thal’s accident, the University of California, San Diego, neuroscience community sustained another hit when Cliff Shults lost a battle with cancer at the age of 56. Shults is best known to students of movement disorders. A professor of neuroscience and a practicing neurologist, Shults focused on Parkinson disease and on multiple system atrophy. He worked on clinical genetics as well as in bench-to-bedside research, such as clinical tests of the over-the-counter supplement Q-10 in people with early PD (see ARF related conference story). For more information on Shults, see UCSD obituary article.—Gabrielle Strobel.