Julie Williams: Inspired by TV science

Julie Williams was born on the 11th of September, 1957, in Merthyr Tydfil in Wales and grew up in the small village community of Cefn Coed.

Julie attended Ysgol Y Graig Primary School and Vaynor and Penderyn Comprehensive School before studying psychology at Cardiff University.

Professor Williams is a leading authority on Neuropsychological Genetics and her research aims to study the risk of developing psychological and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease.

Julie also served as the chief scientific advisor to the Welsh Government between 2013 and 2017. She was just the second person to hold the post.

Julie is currently the centre director at the UK Dementia Research Institute in Cardiff. In her spare time, she enjoys relaxing with her family and watching rugby.

Chris - Alzheimer's has dominated your professional career, but what actually is that? When we say that word, what do we mean?

Julie - Well, I think most people are familiar with memory problems that occur, usually late in life, and those develop into a full blown degenerative disorder that is terminal. But, actually, Alzheimer's begins probably about 20 years before that. So it's asymptomatic in its early stages.

Chris - And why did you end up going down that path?

Julie - I was interested initially in how the brain worked and that got me into psychology, but I was a little frustrated with not being able to understand it at a level that I wanted to. So, when the opportunity arose to go into something more biological, and specifically genetics, I took it, and that has opened up a greater understanding of the minute processes that go to underlie diseases such as Alzheimer's disease.

Chris - So when back in history did you actually start working on the disorder?

Julie - Gosh, it was probably about 25-30 years ago I would say. I joined a team headed by Peter McGuffin and really just went from there. It's an amazing area, genetics. It seemed to develop new ideas, new methodologies almost every year. We were able to do a lot more. So it was a very exciting area, but it opened up our understanding of the biology underlying these diseases.

Chris - Let's go back a bit further than the start of your career because Alzheimer's disease is named after Alois Alzheimer who was a French neurologist/pathologist. He recognised this disorder in its first instance. What would he have been looking at?

Julie - He would be looking at individuals that presented. The first individual that presented with degenerative dementia, he took that through to after the death of this individual to look at the neuropathology and he described the neuropathology in great detail, drawing out what he saw in the brain of this individual and subsequently others'. You saw clumps of amyloid plaques, these plaques that were found outside the neurons, the brain cells. There were sub tangles within neurons and there was a lot of immune activity that the glial cells were also in his drawings, actually. There were more drawings of glial cells than neurons. So he was trying to describe and understand what the picture was and identifying this as a genuine disease, not really a natural way of ageing.

Chris - And how had that picture changed about a hundred years later when you embarked on your work?

Julie - At the time, we knew through twin studies that genes were playing a significant role in Alzheimer's disease. We knew that those with very early onset disease had more of a genetic contribution. With early onset Alzheimer's, before the age of 65, you have about a 90% heritability based on these studies. We knew that there were certain families that had a very strong risk of getting Alzheimer's. We knew if you had some of these mutations in the genes at the initial stages and then that grew to three, you would get the disease. And we could always predict within five years when you would develop the disease, but these were extremely rare, these families, in the population. So we knew genes were there to play a role, but we didn't know what they were for the majority of cases.

Chris - So that was to become the major target for your life's work, as it were. Let's wind back before we talk about that a bit and consider how you got to the stage where you could even take that on. I mentioned where you went to school, but were you from a science-y family?

Julie - No, not really. My father was a businessman, and my mother did a lot of charity work. But my father was always curious. We would routinely sit down to watch Tomorrow's World and he'd always encourage us to do new things and try out new activities or new experiences. So we had an upbringing that allowed us to think more and become curious. My sister is also a pharmacist and she went into science in a different way. So it affected us.

Chris - So you had that, I suppose, springboard into the area of interest, but having the interest and then translating into being a professional, that takes a bit more, doesn't it? So what was it that made you say, 'I'm actually going to do this?'

Julie - Well, I suppose there were other influences. One other thing that really influenced me was this series called The Ascent of Man by Bronowski. I've started to re-watch it actually because it's come back on. This is about somebody who is curious about a variety of things, but it was the science and the biology that really intrigued me and, as I then went on to do my degree trying to understand how the brain worked, people like Broadbent influenced me because he was trying to understand the brain in a very conceptual way, but it was limited. I remember reading something he wrote about the frustration that he would probably never see in his lifetime this biological basis to cognition. But I thought, well, it would be rather nice to see some of that in my lifetime.