Berkeley Talks

On Sept. 17, UC Berkeley hosted the second annual Aging, Research, and Technology Innovation Summit, a daylong event that brought together researchers, entrepreneurs, policymakers and health care workers to tackle some of the biggest questions in aging research. This year’s summit focused on the challenge of understanding and treating neurodegenerative diseases.Randy Schekman, a professor of molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. He spoke at the summit about Parkinson's disease — what we already know about the disease and new research efforts that are underway."We have experienced a pandemic in Parkinson's disease," he told the audience. "The incidence ... is increasing dramatically in spite of the fact that the disease was first recognized and reported by clinical symptoms 200 years ago. As the population inexorably ages, we are experiencing a wave of this disease which inexorably takes the lives of those who are afflicted."Schekman, whose wife died fro