Science can devise solutions to problems like Parkinson's, eventually. The article discusses a few items in the current search-- a good start.<p>If you want better results than an amorphous "someday", you're not gonna get it with our society's current level of engagement with science. Science isn't lucrative, and the public doesn't care about anything other than the usually overstated "breakthrough" headlines.<p>You want diseases to be cured? Make science a priority rather than something extraneous. Get the children and the public excited about science again, then try to steal smart and qualified people from other disciplines with outstanding benefits and hard problems. Make sure there's enough patience and funding (in that order!) to really delve into things.
Genetically I have a 50% chance of getting Parkinsons. My father was diagnosed earlier this year, and 2 of his 4 siblings already have it. There's a medical study being done on our family to try and identify the gene responsible, but we already know my cousins and I have a 50% chance. I'm not sure I'd even want to know whether it's 100% if they were able to do the tests. Not until there's a possible cure for it. Knowing won't change anything if I can't do anything about it. I guess I'm still in denial, trying to just ignore it away for now.<p>I just hope there's a cure by the time my children (6 and 3 now) get to my age, otherwise I'll advise them to think hard about having children and passing on the gene.
To Sergey Brin and all others that fear for Parkinson: only if you forget what others told you and look at the work of Dr Dale Bredesen, you can open your eyes for new ways to cure brain diseases.<p>In a recent presentation, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzCXyjy3BRo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzCXyjy3BRo</a> Dr Perlmutter and Dr Bredesen talk about a real cure for Alzheimer and hint that they think that they can do the same for Parkinson.<p>More info at <a href="http://www.impactaging.com/papers/v6/n9/full/100690.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.impactaging.com/papers/v6/n9/full/100690.html</a> (9 out of 10 patients cured!) and <a href="http://www.drperlmutter.com/learn/studies/" rel="nofollow">http://www.drperlmutter.com/learn/studies/</a>
Great article, in my opinion it sums up the immense possibilities of data usage in modern research. Coming from a health science background I quite often get frustrated from how long it takes for a scientific paper to go from hypothesis to publication. I believe that the use of our immense computational power to process through large amounts of data will continue changing the traditional approach to research. Once we figure out how to reliably tackle the inevitable bias of these data sets traditional data collection will become a topic in statistics history.
Thank you for posting this. I don't have any personal connection to Sergey. But I'd be damn heartbroken to see such a titan of our time be captured by this miserable, disgusting disease.
Methylene blue had some good research behind it. It's not the high tech cutting edge billion dollar drug made possible by big data and artificial intlligence that everyone is dreaming of, so it will probably be ignored no matter how much academic research piles up on it.<p>It also has the intolerable side effect of making one's pee blue.