Search This Blog

Sunday, March 14, 2021

Parkinson's Breakthrough or Plain Old Hype?

You be the judge.

I'd have commented on UW-Madison's Facebook page, but I'm blocked. They are seemingly afraid of substantive dialog. And really, who can blame them? Million's of tax-payer dollars are at stake.

They recently linked to a press release from the university's PR department about purported progress in treating Parkinson's disease.

Primate Center vivisector Maria Emborg has published a paper reporting on her use of stem cells injected into the brains of monkeys who have some symptoms that mimic Parkinson's symptoms in humans.

The reason they have these symptoms is that she had injected a chemical called MPTP into their brains. [If you are interested, here are a handfull of posts concerning this hideousness.]

Now, you'd think from the press release that this was important big news. It isn't, and I'll get to that in a second. What's particularly hideous is what MPTP injected in their brains does to the monkeys. Reasonable people agree that this is just about as terrible a thing as you can do to an animal.

The reason this isn't big news, and what isn't mentioned in the press release, is that very similar research on fully consenting humans has been underway since at least the early 1990s. See Li, Wen, et al. ["Extensive graft-derived dopaminergic innervation is maintained 24 years after transplantation in the degenerating parkinsonian brain." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113.23 (2016): 6544-6549.]

Research using fully consenting humans is the only ethical way to proceed, and probably the smartest.

A bit of trivia: Check out her public funding history.

No comments: