Through seven decades of groundbreaking brain research, Dr. Edith McGeer changed the understanding of how Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s affect the brain.Supplied
The photo that sums up Edith McGeer best for son Rick is one of her holding a throw cushion in front of her face to foil the shot. She was never one for the spotlight.
“My mother was a great woman, and one that you would never look at twice if you saw her out and about,” Rick McGeer says. “And by the way, she liked it that way.”
But the spotlight found his mother anyway, through seven decades of groundbreaking brain research that brought a new understanding of and treatments for complex conditions including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.
“It’s difficult for the rest of us to understand her work in terms of how impactful it was in that world, because medical science is not something that’s commonly known to people,” says Jane Burnes, a long-time family friend whom Dr. McGeer considered an adopted daughter. “What she contributed is absolutely remarkable.”
Dr. McGeer and her late husband and research partner, Dr. Patrick McGeer, were once dubbed “citation superstars” by the former Institute for Scientific Information in Pennsylvania, when the couple were University of British Columbia researchers whose manuscripts one year accounted for a fifth of UBC’s total citations.
That’s gold in the academic world, where multiple citations are affirmation of the importance of a researcher’s findings. Edith McGeer remains one of the world’s 100 most-cited neuroscientists of all time, awarded the Order of Canada, the Order of B.C., and three honorary degrees for work that changed understanding of how Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s affect the brain.
The McGeers were among the first researchers to study the neurotransmitter levodopa as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease, as well as the role of inflammation in Alzheimer’s. A 2022 study that confirmed the leprosy drug Dapsone as protective against Alzheimer’s built on postulations the couple had put forward more than two decades earlier, after a chance conversation with Japanese researchers led them to a study of 3,000 people with leprosy whose rate of Alzheimer’s was nearly 40 per cent lower than the general population while taking the drug.
Edith McGeer died at her Vancouver home on Aug. 28, three months before her 100th birthday and almost one year to the day after the death of her husband on Aug. 29, 2022. She was famously low-profile and unassuming to the end. Her last words to daughter Tori McGeer were the ones she always used when saying goodbye to the people she cared about: “Carry on.”
Edith Ann Graef was born to Charlotte (née Ruhl) and Charles Graef in New York on Nov. 18, 1923. Dr. Graef was a Canadian who had previously been the port doctor in Vancouver. He was married to Charlotte’s sister first before her death in childbirth. Dr. Graef and Charlotte then raised daughter Dorothy from his first marriage and had two of their own children, Elbridge and Edith.
Edith grew up with privilege, chauffeured to private school from the family’s sprawling estate in the Bronx. She chafed at the feeling of being “a bird in a gilded cage,” says daughter Tori, and was delighted to enroll at Pennsylvania’s Swarthmore College at age 16 after graduating high school ahead of her peer group.
A brilliant student, she had earned a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Virginia and landed a position at the Dupont Experimental Station in Delaware – one of the world’s first industrial research labs – before she turned 21.
Chemistry was an unlikely career path for women in that era, and Edith endured more than one male professor holding forth on that. But despite the challenges of being a woman of science in a blatantly sexist time, she rejected any attempt to celebrate her as an example of a pioneering woman in a man’s world, her son Tad McGeer notes.
“She never liked that. She viewed it as sexism,” he says.
Dr. McGeer with her husband Dr. Pat McGeer. Once dubbed 'citation superstars', the couple were leading researchers of neurodegenerative illnesses.Supplied
UBC colleague Lynn Raymond recalls Dr. McGeer’s strong position on that point as well.
“She was a globally pre-eminent scientist, full stop. The fact that she was a woman was not something she wanted anyone to pay attention to,” says Dr. Raymond, director of the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health at UBC.
While at Dupont, Edith campaigned against the whites-only policy at the Dupont Country Club, a recreation facility for Dupont workers. The only co-worker who stood with her was a young Canadian, Patrick McGeer.
They were soon a couple, married in the spring of 1954 and then off to Vancouver so that Patrick could study medicine at UBC. The West Coast connection forged by her father was reawakened.
The initial plan was for Patrick to become a doctor and Edith to have babies. But their first child died after a premature birth, and a stricken Edith turned back to science to help her through the pain. She began volunteering as a researcher at UBC’s brand-new Kinsman Lab for Neurological Research. Her enthusiasm for what was then a brand-new field convinced Patrick to seek work at the lab as well rather than launch a medical practice.
Their research partnership continued for the rest of their lives. That included 24 years when Patrick McGeer had a second job as an outspoken and sometimes controversial B.C. politician, first as leader of the B.C. Liberals and then as a Social Credit cabinet minister.
Edith McGeer’s extroverted, spotlight-loving husband counted on his wife to keep the research fires burning and raise the couple’s three children in those years, though she credited him in a 1981 profile in the Vancouver Sun as being “excellent at diapering babies.”
Son Tad McGeer remembers being packed into the car with his siblings to trail his father’s campaign bus around the province ahead of the 1969 election, when Patrick McGeer was leader of the B.C. Liberal Party. His mother didn’t just jump on the bandwagon in support of her husband, she made him a real one, live music and all.
“When my father became a cabinet minister, Mom had to be the ‘minister’s wife,’ ” Tad recalls. “She didn’t mind it as long as the other person she was having to talk to could hold up their end of the conversation. But she was happy when that all ended in 1986 and my father left politics.”
Edith McGeer laboured as a research assistant at UBC for 20 long years, says son Rick, “horribly exploited” and working without pay for much of that time. Because Patrick McGeer had landed a paid position in the lab before she did in their early days at UBC, the university’s anti-nepotism rules shut her out from a full professorship even while she became one of the most-cited researchers on campus.
The 1981 Sun profile notes that it wasn’t until Patrick McGeer became a B.C. cabinet minister that UBC finally promoted her, in part because a faculty study at that time identified Edith McGeer as one of the most egregious examples of discrimination at the university.
“She was promoted from volunteer to full professor in a matter of months when things finally changed,” Rick McGeer says. “But she never cared about any of that. Whether volunteer or professor, she interacted with everyone exactly the same way that she always had.”
When she wasn’t engaged in groundbreaking research or helping her husband campaign, Edith McGeer was a Brown Owl in Tori’s Brownie group and a Scout volunteer in her two boys’ troops.
She was also a renowned Halloween fanatic when her children were young, converting the family home into an over-the-top haunted house every Oct. 31. Trick-or-treaters would tour through themed rooms, each more chilling than the one before, then converge in the kitchen to find Edith in full witch’s garb, her cauldron suitably boiling over, courtesy of dry ice she had brought home from her lab.
Edith was an avid reader who never left home without a paperback – and later, her Kindle. She was a voracious puzzler as well, whether crosswords, Wordles, or more complicated versions on days when she found the usual puzzles too simple. (“How can they say that ‘monoid’ isn’t an English word?” Rick recalls her complaining.)
Mandatory retirement left the McGeers without a formal position at UBC from 1989 on, but the couple continued to secure grants for their research. Dr. Edith McGeer published 525 peer-reviewed manuscripts in her time as an academic. At age 89, she launched a biotech startup with her husband to develop effective and safe oral therapeutics for Alzheimer’s disease.
Edith McGeer developed colon cancer in 2015, the same year Patrick McGeer suffered a debilitating stroke. Their lifelong friend and former lab assistant Margaret Druhan moved in with the McGeers so they could remain in their home. That was an incomparable gift to the couple and their worried but far-flung children, says son Rick, all of whom are also highly accomplished and live in the United States.
Dr. McGeer leaves her children, Rick, Tad and Tori, and six grandchildren.
Her lifelong dedication to unravelling the mysteries of complex brain diseases will shape understanding long into the future, Ms. Burnes says.
“Much of the work done by Edie and Pat happened a long time ago, and people may not remember,” she says. “But the research that is going on now is all on the shoulders of the work they did.”