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Will the secrets of genetic destiny bring comfort or only more sorrow to a remote land ravaged by violence?
THE LOCALS OF Medellin, Colombia, joke that when God created the world, one of the angels asked him why he was putting so many natural wonders in one place. God replied, "It will even out. Wait till you see the character of the people I'm going to put there." Self-effacement aside, among the people of Colombia there is a curious mixture of pride and bafflement, sorrow and theatricality, regret and resignation about their unusually bloody historya history from which the country has not yet emerged. Violence and beauty intertwine in Colombia in complicated ways, just as the folk saying implies; that much I have learned during the many trips I have made there to conduct research and genetic testing on a rare form of Alzheimer's disease.
The lush valley ofthe Cordillera Central, the range of the Andes where Medellin is situated, is striking. From the airport, it is an hour-long winding descent to the city on a mountain road bordered by verdant slopes. At night, the soft lights in the valley suggest the mythical golden city of El Dorado, the way the first Spanish settlers must have pictured it some 400 years ago. But daylight exposes the urban sprawl that extends well up the sides of the surrounding mountains, and the cruel poverty that penetrates the choked streets. On the far outskirts of Medellin, a few swimming pools and enormous mansions dot the landscape. Some of them are the vast estates of the drug lords, who can be identified in the city by their powerful four-wheel-drive vehicles, and whose pursuits a few years ago gave Medellin one of the highest murder rates of any city not at war.
This highly insular world, where Internet access coexists with ancient folk beliefs, opened to me in 1991. A neurologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, I visited Colombia that year with the support of the Fogarty International Center, a branch of the National Institutes of Health, to help develop neuroscience in Latin America. In October 1992 I traveled to the University of Antioquia School of Medicine in Medellin, where I gave a talk on the biology...