JARED LAZARUS/DUKE PHOTOGRAPHYDuke University School of Medicine’s Allen Roses, who in the 1990s established a link between the APOE gene and Alzheimer’s disease, died of a heart attack he suffered last week (September 30) at John F. Kennedy International Airport while on his way to a medical conference in Greece, The New York Times reported. He was 73.
His contributions to Alzheimer’s research “cannot be valued highly enough,” Roses’s Duke University colleague Wolfgang Liedtke told The (Raleigh) News & Observer. “He made a pioneering observation that stands by itself.”
The researcher’s seminal APOE finding was met with skepticism, but Roses “wasn’t shy about standing up to his critics,” Kathleen Welsh-Bohmer, director of the Bryan Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Duke, told The News & Observer. “He was fearless.”
In 2009, Roses and his colleagues identified a second gene linked to Alzheimer’s, TOMM40. According to The News & Observer, Roses ended up taking out a home equity loan to put nearly $500,000 of his own money toward that discovery.
Roses was also the owner and chief executive officer (CEO) of a small Chapel Hill–based ...
