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Second opinion: the genius of Mahler - in treating his own Parkinson's disease (Filed: 12/09/2006) James Le Fanu on Gustav's great-nephew, the late distinguished physician Robert Mahler Science deals in well-established facts, confirmed by experiments and published in reputable journals. Paradoxically, though, the major source of genuinely new and interesting ideas are precisely those anomalous observations that do not fit the general scheme of things, and thus are likely to be dismissed or ignored. Indeed, as the late distinguished physician Robert Mahler, great-nephew of the composer Gustav, will insist from personal experience, the more apparently inexplicable the observation the greater the likelihood it would lead to some significant discovery. advertisement Robert Mahler was forced to flee his native Vienna in 1938 and arrived in Britain, aged 15, with a single suitcase and speaking no English. His career would epitomise the prodigious contribution of Jewish refugees to every aspect of British cultural and intellectual life in the post-war years. He graduated with first class honours in both biochemistry and medicine from Edinburgh University before launching himself into an immensely productive four decades of medical research into carbohydrate metabolism that included identifying the fundamental biochemical defect of inherited muscle disorders. He developed Parkinson's disease in his sixties which, despite treatment with the wonder drug levodopa, confined him to a wheelchair. At this point, he came across an obscure medical paper concerning a couple of patients similarly afflicted with progressive Parkinson's but whose symptoms had markedly improved following treatment for the stomach infection helicobacter. By any criterion this was anomalous. There seemed no conceivable reason why a bacterium in the stomach should influence the firing of damaged nerve cells in the brain. Still he thought it worth pursuing, starting with himself, and to his astonishment he found his mobility so improved he could dispense with his wheelchair. He persuaded a research group to launch a full-scale investigation, and earlier this year the explanation became clear. The inflammation caused by the bacteria in the lining of the stomach hinders the absorption of drugs like levodopa from the gut - so insufficient amounts reach the brain, seriously compromising their therapeutic effect. Simple, perhaps, but in practical terms, immensely important. [log in to unmask] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn