Match it for Pratchett
A big thank-you to Nick Jordan for alerting me to a great website: Match it for Pratchett.
When Terry Pratchett1 was diagnosed with a rare form of alzheimer’s last year, he decreed it to be an embuggerance
. He went on to donate £500,000 to UK charity the Alzheimer’s Research Trust. Match it for Pratchett is a a spontaneous, grassroots, totally unofficial campaign by loyal readers from around the world
to raise another £500k for the charity.
Pratchett points out (on the Alzheimer’s Trust Website) that research into Alzheimer’s receives just 3% as much funding as does research into cancer, despite them affecting almost the same amount of people.
For the neuroscientists among you… It took me ages to work out exactly what this “rare form” of Alzheimer’s was. Turns out he is suffering from posterior cortical atrophy (also know as Benson’s syndrome) which causes complex visual processing to progressively degrade. PCA is an unusual form of Alzheimer’s in that it affects motor tasks by reducing the persons ability to co-ordinate hand-eye behaviours - Alzheimer’s typically manifests itself in personality changes and anterograde amnesia.
And in case you need persuading to donate, have a quote from the man himself:
Personally, I’d eat the arse out of a dead mole if it offered a fighting chance2
So go donate, and spread the word. I’m off back to revision.
Tom
Footnotes:
- One of my favourite authors of all time, creator of the amazing discworld series [↩]
- via the BBC [↩]
