TETON COUNTY — Groundbreaking research into Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases at a renowned Great Falls facility now has more funding thanks to a gift from a Great Falls native who passed away two years ago.
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According to the Alzheimer's Association, about 21,000 Montanans over the age of 65 are living with Alzheimer's disease.
When Arnold Swanberg died in October 2024, he left two parcels of land in his will — one in Cascade County and the other in Teton County, totaling 480 acres — to the Weissman Hood Institute, formerly the McLaughlin Research Institute.
The institute estimates the value of the land at about $1 million.
Former Great Falls Mayor Randy Gray was one of Swanberg's best friends and now serves on the board of directors at Weissman Hood.
"Arnie's family, unfortunately, had some propensity to neurodegenerative diseases. So he had a personal interest in that. And so after talking to him, it turns out he included Weissmann Hood McLaughlin as a beneficiary for his wheatland in Montana," Gray said.
Swanberg, a University of Montana graduate, was also a member of the Montana Air National Guard, where he developed his passion for planes — a love that turned to picture taking after he moved to Seattle.
"His family had some real estate investments out there. He ended up managing those real estate investments and became a publisher of a publication called Flight Line, which was a magazine that covered military aircraft around the world," Gray said.
"He went around the world and took photographs of military aircraft and then published those photographs," Gray said.
But in his heart, he was never far from Big Sky Country and the land he had inherited.
"Arnie, by the way, became a good friend of those farmers that run that land. And again, that's how he maintained his connection with Montana," Gray said.
The institute is still weighing how best to use the gift.
"We're trying to decide precisely what to do with it. There's all kinds of things, but it gives us a cushion in our endowment funds where we can be much more nimble than we could have been without that land," Gray said.
For the institute's research team, the donation carried special meaning.
"When Arnie Swanberg donated the land, we kind of saw that as a full circle moment. I mean, a lot of our faculty members are here from there. They grew up in Great Falls or neighboring areas and they want to do research that really benefits the area," Weissman Hood Institute Research Director Samantha Peters said.
Swanberg's gift could fit well with Weissman Hood's recent National Institute of Health grant to fund research into lifestyle and genetics in a rural environment, which Gray calls a cutting-edge project.
"Farmers, for example, are more prone to develop Parkinson's, and they think it may have something to do with, you know, regularly being around herbicides and pesticides. So that kind of work has just really not been done before. And we're focused on that now. So Arnie's land may end up as an actual, who knows, test plot for doing some of those kinds of things," Gray said.
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