Dr. Leon Thal, a UC San Diego professor who was one of the world's leading investigators of new therapies for Alzheimer's disease, died in a plane crash Saturday near Borrego Springs, Calif. He was 62.
Thal was an avid flier who had taken off from Montgomery Field in San Diego at 6:15 p.m. Saturday for the half-hour flight to Borrego Springs. Thal's wife reported him missing shortly before his plane's signal was detected at 7:39 p.m. by the rescue coordination center at Langley Air Force Base, Va., said Ian Gregor, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration in Los Angeles. A rescue team later recovered Thal's body in his plane, a Mooney M20J, in a mountainous area eight miles southwest of Borrego Springs. The crash is under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.
Thal was passionate about flying, a hobby that provided relief from the challenges of his work. He told the San Diego Union-Tribune a few months ago that he had flown his plane from Iceland to Scotland once and across the United States seven times.
What wrested most of his attention was fighting Alzheimer's, a degenerative brain disease with no known cure that afflicts 4.5 million Americans, destroying the memory of its victims in stages.
He was director of UC San Diego's Shiley-Marcos Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, which was established in 1984 as one of the original five centers supported by the National Institute on Aging.
Since 1994 he had also headed the Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study, a consortium of 80 clinical sites in the United States and Canada that conduct research on potential treatments for the disease.
"He was the catalyst who brought big groups together to work on very complex problems," said Dr. William Thies, vice president of medical and scientific relations for the Chicago-based Alzheimer's Assn.
"He was a terrific scientist," Thies added, "but I think one of his great contributions to the field was that he made everyone around him better. He could get people to work together ... which is not always easy. He had a wonderful touch with people."
Thal's fascination with Alzheimer's disease began 30 years ago, when he began studies that led him to focus on the role of the chemical transmitter acetylcholine in learning and memory. That work led him in 1983 to publish some of the first evidence that memory could be enhanced in Alzheimer's patients by inhibiting production of a brain enzyme called cholinesterase. This finding provided the basis for the first approved drug to stall the progression of Alzheimer's.
