Daniel Perl remembers the incident vividly. I was downtown and had some time to kill, so I went into the housewares section of Bloomingdale’s. There on sale was a set of aluminum pots and pans--big, heavy, fancy stuff, much reduced. I said to the saleslady, ‘This is a great buy. You must have trouble keeping them in the store.’
‘No, nobody will buy them,’ she said. ‘That’s why they’re on sale.’
‘What do you mean, nobody will buy them?’ I said. ‘They’re beautiful.’
She said, ‘It’s because they give you Alzheimer’s disease.’
‘Oh, really?’ I walked out shaking my head, thinking, ‘What have I done?’
Perl shrugs, eyebrows raised, palms out, a hometown Queens, New York, gesture that says, Whadaya think of that?
The irony is appropriate. By pinpointing the location of abnormally large concentrations of aluminum in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease in the late 1970s, Perl ...
