Word: langston
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...seemed more a mannequin than a man. The 42-year-old heroin addict was bent over and twisted, drooling and unable to speak; almost every muscle was immobilized. No one knew what to make of his condition, so a call went out for Dr. J. William Langston, the hospital's chief neurologist. Langston took one look and was amazed. Carillo's symptoms suggested that he had been suffering for at least a decade from Parkinson's disease, a nervous system disorder that causes tremors and a gradual loss of mobility. But that hardly seemed plausible: Parkinson's rarely strikes anyone...
With help from colleagues at Stanford University, where he teaches, Langston located Lopez and had her hospitalized. A tip from a neurologist in Watsonville, 30 miles away, led him to two more cases: a pair of brothers, both addicts in their 20s, with advanced Parkinson's symptoms. By now Langston was alarmed. He called a press conference to announce that bad heroin was on the streets; he urged that anyone suffering from stiffness and tremors come forward. The appeal uncovered three more cases...
...Stoddard relieved Mark Langston (1-1) in the eighth and balked home a run. The Mariners led 4-3 in the fifth when, with the bases loaded, Al Davis and Pat Putnam hit RBI grounders...
...trouble is that people simply will not disappear. There is too much stubbornness in them, too great a propensity for self-assertion. Langston Hughes' comic character, Jesse B. Semple (known as Simple in Hughes' newspaper column), once boasted that he had been "cut, stabbed, run over, hit by a car, tromped by a horse, robbed, fooled, deceived, doublecrossed, dealt seconds . . . but I am still here." Not even death weakens such a stand. The power of ghosts is that they manage to retain their place in the world in spite of the final obstruction; they insist on their presence...
Several months later Langston read an article in a medical journal about a chemist who had killed himself after contracting Parkinson's-like symptoms from a dose of artificial heroin. From a report analyzing the dead chemist's brain, Langston found that the heroin involved contained an additive similar to the one in the bad batch of heroin he had been studying. The mysterious ingredient, a chemical known as MPTP, had moved from the blood into the brain and damaged the same area affected by Parkinson's disease. No other substance is known to do that. Last April Dr. Irwin...