Sacrificing for research Nuns at School Sisters of Notre Dame in Connecticut sit in the chapel for morning vespers. In a famous and ongoing longitudinal study spanning 30 years, hundreds of sisters from this convent have undergone cognitive and personality testing and eventual postmortem examinations to help shed light on the development, predictors, and progression of Alzheimer’s disease and other neurocognitive disorders. The study has clarified that cognitive and other kinds of functioning in early, middle, and late life may help predict the eventual onset of such cognitive disorders.