From Claire Leeds 

Monroe

To the Editor:

A blossom to my husband for building, maintaining, managing, and sharing with researchers around the world, the databases for UW-Madison’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. I am so proud of the work that you do. Your work verified the accuracy of lower-cost blood tests that can rule out an Alzheimer’s Disease diagnosis. Your work is the decades-long foundation for testing and verifying Alzheimer’s Disease treatments. Your work is built over time, with skill, patience, and commitment. It is methodical and complicated. It took years of education, hard work, and student loan debt, and those years of investment in knowledge, skill, and experience, have not made us rich. What we do have is a mission and a strength of purpose that is bigger than ourselves, that actually helps people. I don’t always understand your work. What I do understand — as a nurse who has cared for people with Alzheimer’s disease — is how much your work supports everyday people like us. People like us don’t have powerful political positions, or billions to fall back on when we get sick. We have federal taxpayer-funded research that leads to health breakthroughs to help us — that’s it. Now that your work is threatened, I must speak directly to our community and tell them: my husband’s work is important right here; the benefit to everyday people like us is real — it can be measured in every blood test that rules out Alzheimer’s disease, it can be measured in every treatment developed. I’m asking everyone in this community to think about the cancer or heart disease treatment, diabetes care, or new medication they, or a loved one received — that intervention was developed with federal taxpayer-funded research. Thank you to my husband, the medical research community, and the taxpayers who understand that their health and medical care rely on decades of federal taxpayer-funded research.