George Siegel, 72

“I call this my Las Vegas jacket. The story is my wife and I are in Vegas and we start losing very, very quickly. It gave my wife a stomach ache. She says, ‘Give me the money we had allotted to lose, and let’s go shopping.’ So, instead of playing the tables and losing all of our money, we both bought leather jackets.”

“I just got back from visiting my two kids and my grandchildren in Israel.… There’s a fine line over there between walking down the street on a happy, innocent day and sudden violence. One day, an Arab man entered a small kibbutz where we were going to have lunch and attacked two little boys with an ax. Then again, when I tell Israelis I’m from Chicago, they say, ‘Oh, Chicago? Al Capone! How can you live there?’”

There’s a George Segal, the actor—
There is. There’s an actor, there’s a sculptor and then there’s me!

Well, what does George Siegel do?
I’m a neuroscientist. My main interests have been in Alzheimer’s disease and in multiple sclerosis.

So you’re smarter than those other two schlubs, huh?
Well, if that’s your opinion. In all modesty, I won’t argue. [Laughs] I’m emeritus professor at Loyola and I was chief of neurology service—now retired—at the Hines VA Hospital.

As a professor, who do you look to for guidance?
My wife, Miriam—she teaches me everything I need to know about human behavior.

Like what?
How to behave! [Laughs] She keeps me in line. If you let your wife teach you how to behave, then you can have a happy marriage. We’ve been married going on 52 years.

You’re an Alzheimer’s expert—can you please explain the prevalence of the disease in politicians? “I can’t recall” has become Capitol Hill’s motto.
[Laughs] This might be a very special form of Alzheimer’s called political Alzheimer’s that only public officials are susceptible to. It’s simply selective memory. A friend of mine once gave me a phrase which I think is kind of cute: These are people whose forgettory is getting longer than their memory.

Not bad. Tell me, how do you decompress from all the heavy neuroscience stuff?
You may laugh, but my hobby is my work. My main activity, you might say, is reading, reading about neuroscience. Even in school, in my early years of public school, teachers would ask the children to put down their hobbies, and I never had any hobbies except reading. The other kids had stamps and sports and various other things—I only had reading.

May I ask your age?
I’m 71. Oh, wait, no. 72! Ah, the forgettory—it’s closing in on me.

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