John P Blass, MD, PhD, has been studying the chemistry of diseases of the brain for over half a century: as an undergraduate at Harvard, as a graduate student with Henry McIlwain, as a postdoctoral fellow first with Heinrich Waelsch and then with Daniel Steinberg, during eight years at the Mental Retardation Center at UCLA, and since 1978 as Burke Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, and Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City (now professor emeritus). His work has concentrated on the role of reductions in brain metabolism in Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders impairing cognition.

• Mechanisms versus Diagnoses.- Molecular Mechanisms of Neuronal Death.- Animal Models of Neurodegenerative Diseases.- Vitamins and Vitamin Deficiencies.- Brain Edema in Neurological Disease.- Pathology of Monoamine Transporters.- Glutamate and Glutamine in Brain Disorders.- The X-linked Mental Retardation.- Cognitive Deficits in Neurodegenerative Disorders.- NFkappaB in Brain Diseases.- Trinucleotide-Expansion Diseases.- Neuroinflammation.- Neurochemistry of Autism.- RNA Pathologies in Neurological Disorders.- Pain.- Biology of Demyelinating Diseases.- Brain Protein Oxidation and Modification for Good or Bad in Alzheimer’s Disease.- Oxidative Stress and Alzheimer Disease: Mechanisms and Therapeutic Opportunities.- Tau and Tauopathies.- Zinc, Zinc Transport and Sequestration Proteins in the Brain in the Progression of Alzheimer’s Disease.- The Genetics of Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease.- Nicotine Receptors in Brain Diseases.- Lysosomal Storage Disorders.- Genetic signaling in glioblastoma multiforme: a current overview.