E laine Perry is Emeritus Professor of Neuroscience at Newcastle University and one of the British researchers most closely associated with the modern study of dementia. Across some four hundred papers she has worked on Alzheimer's, Lewy body and vascular dementia, Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, depression and the visual hallucinations of late-stage cognitive decline.
Her group's work in the 1970s and 80s on the cholinergic basis of Alzheimer's helped lay the ground for a generation of cognitive-enhancing drugs, including galantamine — itself derived from medicinal plants such as snowdrop and daffodil. In 1996 she founded the Medicinal Plant Research Centre in Newcastle and began the long project of bringing herbal traditions into the laboratory.
Dilston Physic Garden, in the Tyne Valley west of Newcastle, grew out of those research interests and her conversations with local medical herbalists; it opened to the public in 2005. With her daughter Nicolette Perry she co-authored Botanical Brain Balms, a guide to fifty-six plants for memory, mood and mind, drawing on the clinical trials and traditional uses that have come through Dilston.
