Excellent Reads

The road switches back and forth again and again as it climbs into Montchavin, perched in the French Alps at 4,100 feet above sea level. The once-sleepy mountainside village, developed into a ski resort in the 1970s, is dotted with wooden chalet-style condo buildings and situated in the midst of a vast downhill complex known as Paradiski, one of the world’s largest.

Well known to skiers and alpinistes, Montchavin also has grabbed the attention of medical researchers as the site of a highly unusual cluster of a devastating neurological disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

ALS, brought about by the progressive loss of nerve function in the brain, spinal cord and motor neurons in the limbs and chest, leading to paralysis and death, is both rare and rather evenly distributed across the globe: It afflicts two to three new people out of 100,000 per year. Though Montchavin is flooded with visitors in winter and summer, the year-round resident population is only a couple hundred, and neighboring villages aren’t much bigger, so the odds are strongly against finding more than just a few ALS patients in the immediate area. Yet physicians have reported 14.