Don: We were neighbors growing up.
- Growing up, yes. - Growing up.
- We went to the junior prom together,
and then we went our separate ways.
At 33, we met again. - Yeah.
- We were on the roof of the Hotel Washington
in Washington, DC.
And that's when I fell in love with him.
- We've been... - Married.
- Married for 35 years. - Yeah, yeah.
- And it's been great.
[giggles]
- I was a scientist, and for, I guess probably...
- Fifteen years. - Yeah, 15 or 20 years,
and I would travel all over the country.
- And the world. - And the world.
I'd been to the Philippines. I've been to...
- Japan. - Japan.
All over the world. - Germany.
- Germany, you know, and I had a great time.
I was driving and... home from a late night,
and I almost went off the road with Corinne.
It could have been very, very bad
because I didn't see the turn.
And so, when that happened, we met up with Dr. Karlawish.
Dr. Karlawish: So, I first met Mr. Nye in 2009
because he was having memory problems
that were annoying and noticeable.
And the mission at that time was to sort out,
are these mild memory problems
some of the effects seen with aging and that's all,
or are these really the symptoms of a neurodegenerative disease.
- Don used to keep multi-million-dollar
scientific protocols in his head.
He just remembered all the details,
but it would have been about 10 years actually
before we went to see Dr. Karlawish in Penn Memory.
He started to forget meetings,
and he started to forget things that he had always remembered,
but he didn't tell me that.
He didn't tell me that until much later.
So, I assumed he was doing fine because in the early stages,
you don't always think
that perhaps it's dementia or Alzheimer's.
- I don't want to say the word because I hate it.
- What word? - The...the...uh, disease.
- Alzheimer's? - Yeah.
- You hate it? - I hate it.
- Okay.
- One of the breakthroughs we're working on now in medicine
is to discover diagnostic tests that can identify people
who are at risk of having cognitive decline,
and testing whether drugs can change that decline.
- Dr. Karlawish is very...
he's very gentle, and he asks a lot of really good questions,
and he listens.
He listens to what is being said and it's been terrific.
The other thing is, as a scientist,
Don really wanted to be part of the clinical trials
and the research that Penn is engaged in,
and he has also willed his brain to Penn as well
so they can use his brain to further the research.
- He has a disease that many people fear more than cancer,
and some say they "never want to know if they have it"
and yet he's willing to get up and talk to the world
about what it's like to have Alzheimer's.
He's interesting as well
insofar as he's very aware of his problems,
and yet, in the face of that, he has coped with it,
and it's very inspiring, actually.
- The research at Penn has been groundbreaking.
- And I'm not ready to lose him. That's why we're here.
We believe they're going to cure this.
- We do.
Our life together.
- That's worth Penn Medicine.
[♪♪♪]