‘I’d bet my house’ on treatment for Alzheimer’s

A Nobel Prize-winning Scottish chemist has told the BBC he thinks drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease will be available within five years.

Princeton University’s Prof David MacMillan, who is originally from North Lanarkshire, said “phenomenal things” are happening within medical research into neurological diseases.

“I would bet my house that within five years that we have marketed drugs for Alzheimer’s,” Prof MacMillan told the BBC’s Scotcast podcast.

“My father died of vascular dementia and my aunt had dementia. I think that’s such a horrible way to go.”

The Scottish scientist was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside Prof Benjamin List after developing a new way of building molecules.

Their work has led to developments in drugs for Alzheimer’s, cancer and heart disease.

Prof MacMillan, 57, said the award had made a massive impact on his life

“On a Tuesday morning, I was a chemist that nobody, including half my pals, had been interested in talking to,” he said.

“Then on the Wednesday, I was talking to like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

“It was crazy – and I thought it would slow down but it just keeps on going.”

Prof MacMillan was awarded a half share of 10 million Swedish krona (£842,611).

He used it to set up The May and Billy MacMillan Foundation, named after his parents, where he funds Scottish students, providing educational opportunities to underprivileged young people.

He said education and learning was always good and gaining more experience was incredibly important.

It is something he knows about from his own life.

He grew up in New Stevenston, near Bellshill, and gained his undergraduate degree in chemistry at the University of Glasgow before moving to the US for postgraduate studies.

“I realised that education is your passport to the world,” he said.

After studying in California in the early 1990s, he moved to Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley before becoming a professor at Princeton in 2006.

He said working in the US had been great because its “research is the infrastructure that drives the health of the world”.

The possibilities of the people he was able to collaborate with had been “mind-boggling”, he said.

However, recent developments in US universities are causing concern, he said.

President Donald Trump and his Vice-President JD Vance have long railed against higher education institutions and they have been putting pressure on them over funding.

For the first time in 25 years, Prof Macmillan’s research group at Princeton has received no funding for the first seven months of the year from the US government.

He said: “Americans still care about the Nobel Prize.

“If that could happen to somebody like me, it could happen to anybody.”

The scientist said that academics were now the resistance as they try to deal with the politics of the current US administration “without selling their soul”.

Prof MacMillan said the cuts were “quite sinister” because it seemed like a way to control universities and the narrative by deciding who they can hire.

Higher education has become a hub for progressive thinking, which in his opinion, he said the Republicans don’t like.

“What they care the most about is retaining power,” he said.

Despite the pressure in the US, Prof MacMillan is not planning a return to Scotland just yet but he does regularly come back to see family – and some newfound friends.

He told the podcast he had become good friends with a Scottish legend who phoned to congratulate him after he won the Nobel prize.

Most people would ignore a call that said ‘No Caller ID’ but he answered to find Sir Alex Ferguson on the other end of the line.

The professor, who was himself knighted in 2022, said he thought one of his friends had been joking with him by pretending to be Sir Alex.

But he recognised that the voice sounded too similar to the former Manchester United football manager.

The two spoke about their common ground of growing up in Glasgow and the pair are now good friends who will be watching Manchester United play Chelsea together later in the year.

Prof MacMillan not only sits next to Sir Alex at football games, the two will now feature together in the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland as the Scots chemist has had his portrait unveiled.

The Scots scientist said he was “blown away by it”.

The painting by Christabel Blackburn depicts the chemist sitting in his office with a white lab coat in the corner.

Prof MacMillan said it was actually a lab coat that he was “quite proud of” because it had been presented to him from his old school Bellshill Academy – which now sits in his office in Princeton University.