An Odyssey of Early Alzheimer’s Disease in Colombia

Please note that this event is in-person only, and RSVPs are requested to attend. Walk-ins are welcome.

Science reporter Jennie Erin Smith spent seven years in Medellín, Colombia, reporting on the world’s largest extended family with genetic early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Smith’s new book, , tells the stories of both the doctors who have been studying this clan since the 1980s, hopeful that it will lead them toward a long-sought cure, and its members, who have spent generations being observed and experimented on. In 2022, Smith’s manuscript was selected to be workshopped by the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, which convened an expert panel of neurology researchers, writers, literary scholars, ethicists, and Colombia experts. The resulting book offers an unusually intimate and at times disquieting look at the realities of research in a developing country. In this illustrated talk, the author will discuss her journey reporting the book, the dilemmas she faced while writing, the failed Alzheimer’s drug trial at the heart of it, and what might be done to create better relationships between researchers and subjects.

Speaker Bio:

Jennie Erin Smith is the author of Valley of Forgetting (2025) and Stolen World (2011). She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, and others. She is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award; the Waldo Proffitt Award for Excellence in Environmental Journalism in Florida; and two first-place awards from the Society for Features Journalism. She lives in Florida and Colombia.

Héctor Hoyos is Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature and English at Stanford, where he also directs the Center for Latin American Studies and the Center for the Study of the Novel. He is the author of the monographs Beyond Bolaño (2015) and Things with a History (2019), both with Columbia University Press. Hoyos is a former Alexander von Humboldt research fellow at Freie Universität Berlin. Garcia Márquez as Law: A Study in Constituent Power and the Imagination is his current co-authored book manuscript.

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