Editorial: Shedding light on Alzheimer’s

Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2006 | 12:31 p.m.

When Frank Gehry's design for the $50 million Lou Ruvo Alzheimer's Institute was unveiled over the weekend, Las Vegas gained a foothold in a new era of medical research.

The center is to be located in Las Vegas' 61-acre Union Park development at the corner of Grand Central Parkway and Bonneville Avenue near downtown. Its design is a curving, gleaming, wavelike configuration of glass and steel with rooms encased in glass.

The design is typical Gehry in that it is anything but typical. It will bring to Las Vegas a sophisticated level of architectural design unlike any in the region and foreign to most communities in the world. Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and Seattle's Experience Music Project building are among the recent Gehry designs to gain worldwide acclaim.

The institute is named in memory of Lou Ruvo, the father of Larry Ruvo, who is managing director of Southern Wine & Spirits of Nevada and a major contributor to the project and its supporting organization, the Keep Memory Alive Foundation. Ruvo commissioned Gehry to design the facility that is to be the site of Alzheimer's treatment and research and also is to accommodate specialists studying Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases.

The project is off to a strong start, with Gehry tending to the outside and Zaven Khachaturian providing expertise inside as clinical and scientific adviser. Khachaturian served as director of the Office of Alzheimer's Research at the National Institutes of Health from 1977 to 1995.

In a recent Las Vegas Sun story, Khachaturian said the treatment goals include helping patients and families learn to cope with Alzheimer's and helping patients learn to live as functionally and independently as possible.

It marks the region's most recent foray into efforts to make Las Vegas a national medical research hub, which started in September with the opening of the Nevada Cancer Institute.

In a city known for being the place to which the world comes to play, such projects as the Lou Ruvo Alzheimer's Institute and the Nevada Cancer Institute can help make Las Vegas a place where the world can also learn to heal. As residents, we should be proud that ours is a community willing and able to tackle some of the most challenging and most frightening diseases of our day.