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A quite hopeful article titled "The causes of Parkinson's disease are being unraveled and rational neuroprotective therapy is close to reality" by Drs. Marsden of the Institute of Neurology in London and Olanow of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York appeared in Annals of Neurology, issue September 1998 vol. 44 (3 Suppl 1) pp. S189-96. According to the Medline Abstract, there are so many new neuroprotective agents ready to be tested that the usual clinical trials procedures will be a bottleneck. "...It is evident that conventional approaches to trials that utilize large numbers of patients in search of small incremental effects are costly and time consuming. As such, it will be virtually impossible to test all of the potentially valuable neuroprotective agents that are now at hand, let alone those that will likely soon emerge. We suggest that it may be more profitable to test a large number of agents in a small number of selected patients in search of a more robust neuroprotective effect. In this way, we will reduce the risk of missing a powerful neuroprotective treatment with a treatment that might not otherwise have been studied because of a lack of time, money, or patients." The Medline abstract ID numbers are: UI - 98420021, PMID- 9749592. Phil Tompkins Hoboken NJ