The End: Obituaries by Jody

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 s...