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Good morning. It was announced yesterday that British scientists have made a major step towards developing a blood test to predict the onset of Alzheimer’s –and this, in turn, may lead to more promising trials for drugs to treat the condition. The director of research at Alzheimer’s Research UK hailed the breakthrough as taking us that bit closer towards making Alzheimer’s a preventable disease. In the book of Revelation, John the divine, as he is known, writes of a vision of the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven, and of a time when ‘there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, nor pain’. This is the Jerusalem that Blake committed himself to building in the poem which became a hymn. And arguably modern science is itself heir to, and an expression of, Christianity’s impatient and restless struggle for a radically new and different world – a world in which Alzheimer’s is a preventable disease, to take the case in point. But the Jerusalem of which Christians have dreamt will not be built by the dramatic breakthroughs of science alone, however much we may welcome them. Even if the great project of overcoming dementia is successful, the human condition in general, and old age in particular, will be left with woes which science cannot cure. Quite by chance, alongside the story about a step forwards in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, there was yesterday a flurry of stories about a different curse of old age, loneliness. GPs are being encouraged to practice social prescribing – sending patients to lunch clubs and on trips to museums. Councils are to be rated by reference to the measures they have in place to tackle social isolation. And a project in Gateshead called Hen Power, which connects people by getting them together to look after chickens, has just received a million pound grant from the Lottery Fund to extend its work across the UK. High tech diagnosis on the one hand, low tech hens on other – we need both. An inspiring vision of a better world should certainly power and encourage the scientific imagination. Without that imagination and the striving to which its leads, we might be left with a rather too passive and pessimistic acceptance that how things are is how they must be. But that same vision and striving should empower not just our scientific, but also our social projects. A better world will be one without dementia to be sure – but also a world without the loneliness and isolation which afflicts too many of the elderly and which need not await a technological fix.