Word: brookhaven
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Metals in the Body. Superficially, there would seem to be little relationship between parkinsonism and the plight of some Chilean miners who have suffered massive manganese poisoning. But an imaginative, Greek-born investigator now working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory noted that some of the symptoms are similar and that the same part of the brain is involved in both conditions. Thanks to his astute observation and his persistence in trying a "discarded treatment, 2,000 or more parkinsonism patients in the U.S. are now enjoying the first effective drug treatment for the disorder. There is hope that after...
...went after the best, was accepted at Harvard Medical School-probably, Cotzias suggests, because no one there minded his fractured English-and was graduated cum laude. After training in neurology at the top places, Massachusetts General and Rockefeller University hospitals, Dr. Cotzias became a full-time researcher at the Brookhaven lab on Long Island, specializing in the movement and effects of trace metals in the body...
...World Health Organization assignment in Chile, Cotzias suspected that the brains of manganese-poisoned miners had suffered chemical changes. He tried a chemical treatment. "It proved to be wrong," says the ebullient and totally unabashed Cotzias. Working on the analogous symptoms in parkinsonism at Brookhaven, he tried another drug treatment. This involved efforts to raise the brain's content of melanin, the pigment in suntanned skin. "Wrong again!" declares Cotzias, with the energy of a small volcano. "The patient's skin got darker, but the tremor got worse...
Tailored Doses. In the small hospital that is part of the Atomic Energy Commission's Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, Dr. George C. Cotzias tried an early, less purified form of dopa and obtained confusing results. Some patients with mild early symptoms got no better; others with more severe disease improved markedly, but in some cases the side effects, such as vomiting, were intolerably severe. Cotzias forecast that the more refined L-dopa form of the drug might be better, and manufacturers began to produce it in increasing amounts...
...severe cases may be lifesaving, Cotzias points out. One patient who for years had been unable to walk or talk, and hardly able to swallow, recovered sufficiently to walk with assistance, to feed himself, and occasionally to speak. This improvement lasted during the year that he spent at Brookhaven. He died in another hospital, from pneumonia caused by getting food in his lungs, after he had been without L-dopa for some time...