'Beautiful gesture'

Frank Hiscock was 6 years old when he began to notice subtle changes in his mother.

An avid skier, she shushed down a slope and promptly announced she wasn't feeling right. She dismissed it, but over time, there were other problems. Her movements became jerky, her behavior erratic and her thinking skewed. She took off from the family's Skaneateles home and turned up with relatives in Rhode Island.

Eight years later, doctors sent her to Tufts University. There, they found that his mother - and many of her relatives with similar symptoms - weren't crazy. They suffered from Huntington's disease, a hereditary, degenerative brain disorder for which there is no effective treatment or cure.