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Last week the President of Caltech was interviewed on public television by the charming Charlie Rose. He asserted that spending enormous sums on research is not going to bring about the results that advocacy groups expect. His line of reasoning seemed to be that scientific breakthroughs depend a great deal on chance. There are just not enough young scientists in the pipeline to make a big push towards curing various diseases. Discoveries will happen gradually, dependent on the number of trained people in the research community. Then today the president of Intel invited himself on the same show to give a rebuttal. He's a prostate cancer survivor who has gone to great lengths to educate himself about the disease, and has been an effective advocate for increasing funding for research. The arguments he gave were the same as the ones that the Parkinson's Action Network and the Parkinson's Alliance have prepared for us: that when the right conditions are set up and the key people are given the opportunity to share ideas, science happens. It's not all serendipity. In the middle of the various grass roots efforts to push for a cure, I've always harbored a lingering doubt. What if we're so far out of synch with how the scientific community works that we're being ineffective, or even worse, that we're alienating them? So it was reassuring to hear the Intel president, another warm and thoughtful Hungarian/American like our Margaret, reaffirm that we're on the right track. Adding up some experiences in the last few years, my doubt is disappearing: Morton Kondrake's powerful television essay on "the Politics of Medicine",and Dr. Langston last year at the PAN forum imagining a "Manhattan Project" style effort towards curing neurological diseases. In February, when I described the seed money project to parkinsonologist Dr. Mathias Kurth at a patient workshop in Orange County, he said that if Pennies for Parkinson's had existed when he was starting out, "it would have changed the course of my career. Today was the first day that I was too "off" to stay at my job in the afternoon. "Fund the Research, Find a cure." I'm ready. Mary Yost, 51, diag. 42 [log in to unmask]