Parkinson's Disease: A Family History

Parkinson's disease is part of journalist Dave Iverson's personal history:
His father had it, his brother has it and he has it. 

Now, in the PBS Frontline documentary "My Father, My Brother, and Me,"
Iverson attempts to understand and explain the degenerative neurological
disorder that affects more than one million Americans. He examines the
potential offered by stem cell research and also reports on possible genetic
and environmental triggers of disorder. 

Iverson has been an executive producer and anchor of national, regional, and
local specials for public broadcasting for nearly 30 years. 

Audio from Fresh Air from WHYY
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100072610

Related NPR Stories:
08/22/2003 - Gene Therapy For Parkinson's Disease
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1405853

09/09/2006 - Scenes from a Struggle with Parkinson's Disease
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5788850

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My Father, My Brother, and Me

In 2004, Frontline correspondent Dave Iverson received the same news that had
been delivered to his father and older brother years earlier: He had
Parkinson's disease, a degenerative neurological disorder that affects more
than 1 million Americans, the causes of which remain largely unknown and the
cure for which has proved frustratingly elusive. 

In 'My Father, My Brother, and Me', Iverson sets off on a personal journey to
understand the disease that has taken such a toll on his family. Along the
way, he meets some remarkable people -- a leading Parkinson's researcher
whose encounter with "frozen" heroin addicts led to a major breakthrough; a
Parkinson's sufferer given a new lease on life by an experimental brain
surgery; and a geneticist who helped identify some of the gene mutations
responsible for Parkinson's and who is now working on drugs to fix them. 

Iverson also has intimate conversations with fellow Parkinson's sufferers
actor Michael J. Fox and writer Michael Kinsley, who describe how they became
caught up in the politics of Parkinson's research after the Bush
administration greatly restricted federal funding for promising stem cell
research in 2001, three years before Iverson got his diagnosis. 

Frontline link:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/parkinsons/

Introduction:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/parkinsons/etc/synopsis.html

Submitted by Eric E. Sabelman