Simon Lovestone, a British molecular scientist, hopes one day to make a significant contribution to addressing one of the pressing medical issues of ageing societies: the burden of dementia. His experiments with fruit flies have found that treating an enzyme that appears to play a key role in Alzheimer’s may slow or halt the condition. He now has drugs in early clinical trials that may be able to do the same for the treatment of dementia in humans.

But Prof Lovestone (pictured), who is professor of old age psychiatry at London’s Maudsley hospital, is painfully aware that progress has been slow – perhaps needlessly so.