Many chronic diseases have an environmental component.
That is seen most clearly in the impact of dietary and stress-related factors on cardiovascular disease. Our job is to elucidate what those factors are, because only then can we achieve prevention. Yet there are aspects of the field that require a reliance on the laboratory, where progress is made through solid, persistent bench research. Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, which result from death of a specific set of nerve cells, can be particularly devastating emotionally as well as physically, because they sometimes occur in the same family, or even the same person. These inexorably progressive diseases attack different sets of aging neurons, destroying memory and motor function, respectively.