This sounds great, except for the fact that I have passed the early years of PD and presently, no research can raise my enthusiasim or hope for an effective medicine and so I would prefer to use the little precious time left for me to try to refine meditation

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...rkinson%27s%29
ScienceDaily (Nov. 10, 2011) — Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have devised a simple test, using dopamine-deficient worms, for identifying drugs that may help people with Parkinson's disease.

-The worms are able to evaluate as many as 1,000 potential drugs a year. The researchers have received federal funding that could increase that to one million drug tests a year.
-Pierce-Shimomura says that although humans have a vastly more complex nervous system than the worms, the two species share an "ancient and conserved" genetic structure to their dopaminergic systems. What works to overcome a dopamine deficiency in the worms may do something similar in humans, and it can be tested in worms with extraordinary speed.

A huge barrier to preventing or treating diseases such as Parkinson's is the amount of time it takes to identify drugs that work effectively. Typically, drugs are tested on mice -- a process that is expensive and requires one to two years for mice to age while testing just a few dozen drugs at a time.
With the help of a few undergraduates Pierce-Shimomura believes that he can test about 1,000 drugs a year. The number could rise to one million a year if the process can be automated.
He recently received a $3 million Transformative Research Projects Award from the National Institutes of Health with mechanical engineering professor Adela Ben-Yakar, to develop just such an automation process for parkinsonian worms as well as worms mutated to have other neurodegenerative diseases, including a C. elegans version of Alzheimer's. ( I say it is all about money-my comment)
"These worms are so simple to work with, we can do these drug screens at massive scale," says Pierce-Shimomura. "Right now the more hands we have, the more targets we can test."