Word: parkinsonism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Ecstasy is an amphetamine-like drug that affects emotions by boosting levels of another neurotransmitter, serotonin, which is normally connected with feeling happy. Serotonin has rarely been associated with muscular movement. Confusingly for the researchers, scans of Lawrence's brain show that ecstasy has a beneficial effect on his Parkinson's even when he takes it on its own, without L-dopa...
...Researchers around the world, including Crossman and Brotchie, have suspected that serotonin may have some connection with Parkinson's and have been searching for a serotonin-stimulating drug to combine with L-dopa. They have had little success, though, and the news that the missing link may be ecstasy, or at least something in it, has cheered the Manchester duo. "The reason we're excited by Tim's case is that we've spent between us the best part of 50 years trying to understand movement disorders, and the effect we see in him with mdma [ecstasy's scientific name...
...Brotchie's enthusiasm is shared by Dr. Thomas N. Chase, a neurologist who heads the experimental therapeutics branch of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. "We don't work with street drugs, but we are not averse to taking clues from all sources," Chase says. "Parkinson's is a condition for which there is no adequate therapy, so if this observation with ecstasy is reliable, it could lead to a line of research which could benefit many, many people with this disease. And my guess is that this observation will...
...chance that Lawrence's case came to the notice of researchers at all. Documentary director Jemima Harrison of Carlton Television, which produced the bbc documentary, was making what looked like a routine report on Parkinson's research. A friend of hers had recommended Lawrence as an especially articulate sufferer. "We were talking about filming him trying a new surgical technique in Spain," says Harrison. "Then one day I asked him out of curiosity if cannabis helped him at all. He said no, and I nosily asked if he'd tried any other drugs. He said, ?Well, I occasionally take ecstasy...
...some of the same techniques could also be used to grow a baby. Trying to block one line of research could impede another and so reduce the chances of finding cures for ailments such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, cancer and heart disease. Were some shocking breakthrough in human cloning to cause "an overcompensatory response by legislators," says Rockefeller University cloning expert Tony Perry, "that could be disastrous. At some point, it will potentially cost lives." So we are left with choices and trade-offs and a need to think through whether it is this technology that alarms...