In the whitewashed world of Alzheimer’s research, one scientist is on a quest to understand the diversity of brains
By Usha Lee McFarling,
STAT
| 03. 30. 2023
CHICAGO — When she entered the field of Alzheimer’s research a quarter century ago, Lisa Barnes was deeply disappointed to find few Black people like her family members with dementia were being studied. A rarity herself — as a Black female cognitive neuropsychologist — she’s spent her career quietly pushing back.
Since 2004, Barnes has been running the Minority Aging Research Study, one of the nation’s largest studies of Alzheimer’s focused exclusively on Black people and has created a brain bank used by other researchers to understand the illness in this population. This was no easy feat, given that many of the people she hoped to study grew up amid Jim Crow laws and often held a deep mistrust of medical science and its experiments.
“We were learning a lot about Alzheimer’s and cognitive decline but those studies didn’t have people of color, African Americans in particular,” said Barnes. “I wanted to interrogate some of the lived experiences of older African Americans based on what I knew about my own family,” she said in a recent interview at her office...
Related Articles
By Jeffrey Gettleman and Maya Tekeli, The New York Times | 09.24.2025
For some Greenlanders, sorry isn’t enough.
The prime minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, made a special visit Wednesday to Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, to apologize in person for a traumatic chapter in Greenlandic history, when Danish doctors forced birth control on...
Sir Francis Galton, 1890s, by Eveleen Myers (née Tennant)
npg.org
Public Domain via Wikipedia
As has been discussed in recent issues of Biopolitical Times (1, 2), there are, increasingly, companies that claim to be selling parents better babies by selecting the “best” embryos. These services don’t come cheap – think $50,000, or even more, for embryo testing, plus perhaps as much again for IVF and concomitant services. To most of us, that is extremely expensive...
By Margaux MacColl, The San Francisco Standard | 09.17.2025
Designer babies are coming soon to an IVF clinic near you.
Nucleus Genomics, founded by Kian Sadeghi in 2020, when he was just 20, got its start analyzing genomes to weigh a person’s risk of everything from cancer to ADHD...
By Auriane Polge, Science & Vie [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 09.19.2025
L’idée de pouvoir choisir certaines caractéristiques de son futur enfant a longtemps relevé de la science-fiction ou du débat éthique. Aujourd’hui, les technologies de séquençage et les algorithmes d’analyse génétique repoussent les limites de ce qui semblait encore impossible. Au croisement...