Pratchett donates $1 million to Alzheimer's research

Bestselling author Terry Pratchett has donated $1,000,000 to fund Alzheimer's research. Pratchett announced that he had a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's last December, and he's since discovered that there's an enormous gap in the science of Alzheimer's, noting, "I'd eat the arse out of a dead mole if it offered a fighting chance."

"I am, along with many others, scrabbling to stay ahead long enough to be there when the Cure comes along. Say it will be soon – there's nearly as many of us as there are cancer sufferers, and it looks as if the number of people with dementia will double within a generation. In most cases, alongside the sufferer you will find a spouse suffering as much. It is a shock to find out that funding for Alzheimer's research is just 3% of that to find cancer cures."

Mr Pratchett's donation is in recognition of the urgent need to provide funding for research into the disease, which affects an estimated 700,000 people in the UK. For every person with Alzheimer's, £11 is spent each year on UK research compared with £289 for each cancer patient, even though similar numbers of people are affected.

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(Thanks, Irene!)

(Image: Pratchett Himself, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from Myrmi's Flickr stream)

See also: Terry Pratchett has rare, early-onset Alzheimer's