Apr
30
Bringing Family Wealth to Bear Against a Relentless Illness
ByAlice Anane’s father died suddenly of a brutal brain-wasting disease when he was 49. She was 15 at the time and remembers her family thinking that he had contracted mad cow disease on a trip to Britain.
Twenty years later, when she was pregnant with her third child, a routine amniocentesis revealed something different: Her father had most likely died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare illness known as C.J.D. that erases the brain as it ends life, typically within three months…