Alzheimer's researcher, now a patient, still fights disease

Rae Lyn Burke was driving to work in Menlo Park, Calif., when it happened — she realized she couldn't do math anymore.

A career scientist who'd worked at many biotech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, Burke was used to doing simple math problems in her head while behind the wheel. It was a relaxing habit.

But that day four years ago, she couldn't remember how to do multiplication. And she panicked. She'd been a researcher long enough to know almost immediately what was wrong: She had Alzheimer's disease.

"I'd seen patients with it. I'd seen them develop more symptoms," said Burke, 63, sitting in her kitchen. "I knew what it looked like, and it frightened me."

She was formally diagnosed a year later, in August 2008. Burke had to give up her research and leave her job at SRI International, where she'd led the vaccine development department for six years.

Since then, she's launched a new era in her scientific career: as a patient advocate and a test subject. In fact, she's a patient in a clinical trial testing the very vaccine to treat Alzheimer's that she helped develop more than a decade ago.

"Life is full of ironies," Burke said with a small smile.

"I was devastated with my diagnosis," she said. "You think, 'This is the end. What can I do now?' " And then she added, her voice strong and firm: "But there are a lot of opportunities. I have so much energy, and I want to be doing something useful."

Burke is in the early stages of Alzheimer's. She gets flustered when she tries to remember dates and other numbers, and she loses track of the details when she makes coffee, but her memory is sharp when it comes to her research.

She always wanted to be a scientist. As a child, she read about Marie Curie and thought, "Yes, I want to do this," she said.

At her first job, with Chiron Corp. in Emeryville, Calif., she worked on a hepatitis B vaccine. That started her career in vaccine development.

She eventually struck out on her own, contracting her work to various labs. In the late 1990s, she joined researchers at Elan Corp. who were working on a vaccine that potentially could be used to treat Alzheimer's disease.