No meeting of the minds -- yet

SAN FRANCISCO — On a warm autumn afternoon, toward the end of a daylong barrage of PowerPoint presentations, a white-haired, gentlemanly fellow named Michael Merzenich faced a room full of neuroscientists and pharmaceutical executives and declared that, really, they could all pack up and go home. He thought he could stop Alzheimer's disease by doing nothing more than sitting old people down for a few months in front of computer screens and retraining their brains.

What was odd about Merzenich's pronouncement was that it hardly seemed odd at all. He had been preceded to the stage -- and was followed the next day -- by a procession of researchers who offered widely variant prescriptions for confronting the disease, many as complicated as Merzenich's was comparatively simple.

The scientists blamed Alzheimer's on misfolded proteins, broken neural pathways, misprinted gene maps, everything, it seemed, but the stage of the moon. Here and elsewhere for years they have laid plans to fight the disease with all of the Big Pharma firepower they could muster. But they also talked about inhaling insulin, eating turmeric, fixing vitamin deficiencies, injecting stem cells and inventing neuro-protective vaccines. They couldn't all have been talking about the same disease, could they?

A month after San Francisco, at another conference (this time in New York), some of the same participants delivered much of the same data, but with yet more novel approaches piled on. A month later, the road show moved on to San Diego, where even more alternate explanations were added to the roll.

As with Merzenich, when someone stands in front of a crowd of excessively bright and dedicated scientists and delivers a theory radically different from what everyone else in the room has been saying, nobody blinks. Or even seems to notice. It wasn't that the other scientists thought Merzenich was wrong or right or crazy. He is a highly respected neuroscientist. In Alzheimer's research, lots of people seemed to have quit believing anything is wrong or right or crazy. Mainly, they shrug.

Surveying the ideas proposed at the New York meeting, Grant Krafft, chairman of Acumen Pharmaceuticals Inc. of South San Francisco, shook his head and sighed. "There was a lot of mucked-up science here today," he said.