What just about everyone knows is that my mother died from cancer. She didn’t smoke, nor did she have the smoking-related sort of lung cancer; it was probably environmental, although who knows. Sometimes, genes just hate you. Some people know that my (paternal) grandfather is a medical literature oddity, thanks to his service record in WWII, and died from complications of a calcium shell around his heart. What most people don’t know is that my (maternal) grandmother died of Alzheimer’s, and it became a bit of an admittedly macabre running joke in my family to blame Mom’s spaciness or my tendency to forget things that are middling to early on-set. (Yes, tasteless, but hey, that’d be my family on these subjects.) Thing is, Alzheimer’s often skips generations, so… *glances around* Yep. One of those bullet-time bullets hanging in the air, maybe going to hit me or one of my sibs, but maybe we’ll bend out of the way fast enough.
Anyhow, I keep up on research, for obvious personal interests. So today’s Match It for Pratchett, courtesy of Neil’s blog caught my eye, and I’m reprinting it here. (For those of you who missed it, Terry Pratchett has an early-onset form of Alzheimer’s, and it’s grim, grim news.)
Today, it was announced that Terry Pratchett has donated half a million pounds to Alzheimer’s research. Hearing that, it occurred to me that if half a million of us all donated a pound to Alzheimer’s research, we could match his donation and make it an even million.
So whaddaya say, guys? It’s a pound. That’s about 2 bucks US dollars, give or take a couple of (US) pennies. You can spare that much. Go here and make your donation. Tell them it’s in honour of Terry Pratchett.
Let’s do it!
Fastfwd‘s idea, gillo‘s image/icon, a fantastic idea. Pure money like this is important in medical research – it drives actual research, with actual results; we don’t have to worry about companies tweaking results because of the pharma-money backing, we don’t have to worry as much about trial results influenced by needing to please shareholders, there are no strings attached – how research should always be conducted, in an ideal world we’ll probably never live in. So contribute a couple of bucks, wouldja? It just might make a difference in someone’s life – might even be mine.