About Stephen Hawking. My take on him is that he is a wonderful scientist, but people don't understand the meaning of scientist, doctor, etc. Stephen is a mathematician and a physicist, That's his forte and that's what he studies. He probably doesn't even dabble in neurochemistry, and if he does, he is probably just as stumped as the world's best neuropharmacologists and neurosurgeons who are actively working on ALS. ALS is even more mystifying of a brain disease than PD is; there is little that has been revealed to even give ALS victims some kind of relief from the disease. For the life of me, i can't understand why or how Stephen is still alive, in his debilitated state, or how he can even function as a "powerhouse" researcher in his field.
Stephen has at his hands, the worlds most powerful tools to do research in his field, and that costs big bucks.
What a bona -fide PD researcher needs are expensive tools such as "instant" literature searching to see if an idea has been written down somewhere and what work was performed on it. LIterature searching has been made "ultra-easy" in the field of medicine and chemistry, but it costs a lot of money to get these services on-line. And then, when one gets an idea, it is usually always a tremendous arbeit to actually do the work itself.
How many neurosurgeons have actually performed "cell transplants" in humans? How many have good ideas of inventions that would make such procedures easy to do? How many companies with big pockets, have given the go ahead to perform such work? How many companies are currently working on PD doing more than just developing a "better" agonist? Have PD animal paradigms evolved beyond MPTP or 6-hydroxy dopamine lesioning of one brain hemisphere of a rat, and then simply trying to quantify the effect of a single chemical entity for it's ability to lessen the effects of the procedure, which hardly means anything translatable to the PWP in the street?
What we need are neurosurgeons that have the guts, the tools, the ability and support to do human studies, upon the discovery of promising new techniques, developed from unique and truly workable results with higher animal forms such as primates, and the use of controversial methods , without PETA or some fanatical religious group burning down their labs or shooting them.
THis brings to mind GDNF infusion. It is obvious that state of the art techniques and brave new inventions could get "the goods" to affected brain areas, as seen by newer imaging techniques like never before. WE can see and specify areas where cellular activity is compromised in certain brain diseases, and with the ideas generated by these "specialist" scientists we can think of things and ways of introducing these things to these areas.
But there is something about that is lurking sinister and is holding back the work of these geniouses IT is fear and ignorance aplenty, the nemesis of the bright light of science. WHy? I don't know. I can visualize the procedures and the promising substances in my mind, but I am so much of nothing to do anything about it.
Just like ridding the world of the anopheles mosquito that transmits malaria, many biologists have put forward ideas to anihilate the species, or intercept the transmission of the vector responsible for the disease, but what have we got so far; just expensive new chemicals from Artemesia for symptom relief, and insecticide impenetrated netting for over the beds of people that work a bit, but all it takes is one slip up, like going potty at night, and you're a malarial case.
And AIDS, at least there is knowledge and tools to stop the transmission of this horrible killer that has left millions of orphans in sub-sahara Africa, but the ignorance and pure "who gives a $hit" attitudes of human beings will ensure that there will be many more victims before some genious biologist discovers a vaccine for this rampant killer.
So much for brain diseases. we aren't personally responsible for getting PD, we don't know what causes it, except to say it's vectors are partly genetic, partly environmental. Other than that, we keep getting stumped on how it develops and how to slow or prevent it from occurring at all.
I'm too dyskinetic to go on; I'm kicking the computer table with my knees and making to many spelling mistakes, so i'm just too damn frustrated to go on. cs