Berman was surprised at the young man’s candor, but he was right. Alzheimer’s had a death grip on his mother and her brain was wasting away, and with it her personality, everything that made her Susan Berman. To all intents and purposes, that person had been erased and replaced by this horribly reduced version of her, one who would soon lose the ability to control any bodily functions as the brain proceeded to shut down completely. His mother was now less functional than a small child, but that wasn’t precisely the right analogy for her. Berman thought she was less capable than even that.

Thanks to his extensive research, Berman knew what was happening to his mother. Her brain was a collection of neurons or nerve cells that passed information from one to another. Thoughts, ideas, memories, such as the ability to recognize her surviving son—all these could be described by chemical or electrical interactions among nerve cells. In some people like Susan, these interactions started to become interrupted, blocked by abnormalities called amyloid plaques, made up of a protein called beta-amyloid, or by neurofibrillary tangles, also caused by misplaced proteins called tau. In each case, the hard proteins built up to such a degree that they blocked neuron transmission, killing the brain one neuron at a time. When tau proteins performed their proper function, they physically assisted in the feeding and maintenance of the neuron, but under certain conditions, the tau came together like strands of thread, to disrupt and destroy the microtubules that made up the structure of the neuron.

Berman shuddered, unable to avoid the horror of imagining himself sitting where his mother was now. Although the home was clean and well run, it still reeked of old, incapacitated people, of urine and God knows what else. He hated to see his mother like this and hated to be in such a depressing place, but still he came, despite his mother’s not recognizing him or even remembering he’d been there.

As he watched his mother, he felt a rising sense of anxiety that he had to speed up the work with the microbivores. They had to be available if and when he started a downhill course, maybe even before that happened. Each day when he couldn’t remember some fact or figure, he worried that it was starting. A few hours earlier, while he was on the plane, he couldn’t remember the name of his favorite movie actor. It hadn’t been until he’d gotten back to his office at Nano that the name Tom Hanks came to him out of the blue and relieved his anxiety.

Berman believed that the microbivores were going to be the answer since they had the theoretical ability to work within the brain, identifying and destroying rogue tau proteins and beta-amyloidal plaque. But if his team followed the typical development path, they were looking at years of work and a huge amount of fund-raising that had been taxing his creativity. But now he had a source. He just had to make sure the spigot stayed open, meaning he needed results.