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Paula,

I'm sorry, I don't know you, but do I know two of the people who were in the trial you are referring to (Freed et al - University of Colorado), and they did not "grow teeth" in their brains or extra eyeballs. And only someone who has never experienced dyskinesias would describe them as "ghastly." Someone like the NYTimes reporter who coined that phrase four years ago (Gina Kolata) in a hit piece on the Freed study which was picked up by the AP and widely disseminated, but whose retractions for the errors in the article were buried in those papers that even bothered to carry it . I bet most of the folks on this listsrve have had dyskenesia ranging from mild to debilitating, including myself, but a PWP would never call dyskinesia "ghastly" to behold. We see it and suffer with it every day.

Sensationalistic and uninformed statements about science should not stand uncorrected. Please check your facts more carefully before repeating such third hand nonsense. The Freed study was flawed - it used fetal tissue implants and was not a stem cell trial (it was begun years before James Thompson first discovered and isolated embryonic stem cells in humans in 1998). But like all great research it proved something crucial to the advancement of what would become stem cell science - you can regrow dopamine-producing tissue in humans with stem cells (which happened to be in small amounts in the inplanted fetal tissue).

The dyskinesias were in fact evidence that dopamine supply had increased in patients to the point of excess. That why they call it research - that's how we learn. They will get it right with the support of an informed patient population for whom they work very hard for relatively little money.


Other "facts" in your post are equally off base, but I am too "off" right now to continue typing. But having had lunch last week with one of the best "younger researchers" on the planet, Clive Svendsen of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, I can tell you he is using stem cells in at two important research studies, one of which is funded by The Michael J. Fox Foundation.

Greg Wasson

Paula Nixon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
The funny thing about stem cell treatment

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