The Big Picture

• Meredith makes a groundbreaking Alzheimer's discovery in the Grey's Anatomy Season 19 finale, upsetting her colleagues, who discourage her.
• Amelia believes that Meredith's research insults Derek's work on Alzheimer's disease.
• Meredith's Alzheimer's breakthrough honors Derek's legacy, and given her personal connection to the disease, she deserves to make the discovery.

In its ongoing, nearly twenty-year run, Grey’s Anatomy has had plenty of dramatic and devastating moments as we've watched these doctors go through hell and back on their quests for love and medical excellence. One story, however, stands out as possibly the most heartbreaking, but also the most realistic. This, of course, was when we watched Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) slowly lose her mother to Alzheimer’s disease. While her relationship with Ellis (Kate Burton) was strained at best, watching Meredith take on the burden of her mother’s care while also trying to salvage a maternal bond was hard to watch. Evidently, this tragedy was just as upsetting to Meredith’s husband, Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey), as he went on to conduct a clinical trial for a potential Alzheimer’s cure. Flash forward to Season 19, and Meredith returns to Grey’s Anatomy to announce that she’s made an Earth-shattering discovery that could change the face of Alzheimer’s as we know it, and… her friends are mad at her?

Meredith Has a Breakthrough With Alzheimer's Research in Season 19's Finale

When Jackson Avery (Jesse Williams) briefly returned to Grey’s Anatomy in Season 19 to offer Meredith a position in Boston to conduct her Alzheimer’s research, it seemed like she was finally getting her shot at finding the cure she’d been searching for. With Jackson heading up the prestigious Avery Foundation, he was able to give Meredith a golden ticket to do all the research her little genius-surgeon heart desired. In her return in last year's Season 19 finale, Meredith was reunited with friends and family as some of her closest Grey Sloan coworkers traveled to Boston for the Catherine Fox Awards. However, when Meredith reveals that she’s had a breakthrough in her research that will make them rethink everything they know about Alzheimer’s, her colleagues seem less than thrilled.

Her friend and father figure Richard (James Pickens Jr.) tells her that people will think she’s crazy for going against what is already known about Alzheimer’s, and that she should keep her discoveries private and only study them on the side. Meredith’s sister-in-law Amelia Shepherd (Caterina Scorsone) is particularly upset because she believes that Meredith’s breakthrough insults her departed brother’s Alzheimer’s research. She even goes as far as to later tell Richard that Meredith’s research “sinks her brother’s entire legacy,” which is not only super dramatic but also objectively untrue.

What Happens to Meredith and Derek's Alzheimer’s Trial on 'Grey's Anatomy'?

There’s no denying that Derek did important work on Alzheimer’s, but it was hardly the cornerstone of his impressive career. In Season 7 of Grey’s Anatomy, Derek started a clinical trial for Alzheimer’s, with Alex Karev (Justin Chambers) as his resident assistant. While Alex was excited about the project, he soon realized that Meredith was the one who should assist, as she had the necessary experience with Alzheimer’s to keep the patients calm and really understood the implications of the disease. (Or, as he put it to Derek, she was the only one “twisted enough to handle that crap.”)

The trial was neither a success nor a failure, but Meredith tampered with the study when she ensured that Richard’s wife, Adele (Loretta Devine), would receive the active drug rather than the placebo. This caused a major rift between Meredith and Derek, and resulted in Derek being blacklisted by the FDA and being forced to pass his study on to another doctor at a different hospital. Amelia wasn’t a part of Grey’s Anatomy’s main cast yet at the time, so she wasn’t even there to see this instance of Meredith well and truly screwing with Derek’s research, however well-intentioned it may have been.

Beyond just the fact that Derek’s Alzheimer’s work was short-lived, it was also one of the few pursuits of Derek’s career that wasn’t driven by his ego. Derek didn’t just research Alzheimer’s because of professional passion, but rather because he saw how much Ellis’s diagnosis wrecked Meredith. As Meredith was also proven to be genetically predisposed to the condition, Derek was terrified of losing Meredith to the disease, and knew that she didn’t want her family to have to take care of her. He also had a history of taking on “impossible cases” and saving lives that other surgeons had written off, and he was well-known for being one of the best neurosurgeons in the business. Derek's hubris may have been the motivator behind a lot of his surgical endeavors, but his work on Alzheimer’s was purely a labor of love.

Furthermore, when Meredith became a part of the clinical trial (ill-fated though it was), she took the fight against Alzheimer’s into her own hands and proved how much the work meant to her. Even though Derek would have loved to be the one to have a major breakthrough, his only qualm with Meredith’s ongoing Alzheimer’s research would be that he’s not there to do the work alongside her.

Meredith’s Season 19 Finale Breakthrough Honors Derek’s Legacy

If anything, Derek’s medical legacy would be through his work on the brain mapping initiative which he was working on when he died. A project with fellow surgeon and friend Callie Torres (Sara Ramírez), the brain mapping project aimed to make robotic limbs that could be controlled by sensors in the brain. The project was so impressive that the President asked Derek to go to D.C. to work on it, although we all know how that eventually turned out. The bottom line is that while he was passionate about the cause and did his best to work towards a cure, Alzheimer’s was about as significant to Derek’s career as his ferry boat scrub caps.

Although it’s valid that Amelia doesn’t want her brother’s work to be forgotten after his death, channeling this into resentment towards Meredith’s Alzheimer’s research feels unearned and unfair. The decision to have Amelia pick this fight makes it so that Meredith is still in the shadow of Derek’s career even after his death, while also making it seem like she’s insulting her dead husband. As we wait to see if Meredith Grey does, in fact, find a cure for Alzheimer’s (is there anything Shonda Rhimes can’t do?) in Season 20 of Grey's Anatomy, we can only hope that Amelia realizes that Meredith’s discovery doesn’t diminish Derek’s research, but rather honors it. While Derek was a brilliant neurosurgeon that deserves recognition, the fight against Alzheimer’s was always Meredith’s.

Grey's Anatomy is available to stream on Hulu in the U.S. Season 20 premieres March 14 on ABC.

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