Last Friday I had a few free hours on a family trip to Washington DC, so I
took the standard tourist tour of NIH. What a vast empire! The
communications staff member took us to the roof of the main building so we
could have a bird's-eye view of the 300 acres of their realm. She walked
us through the pathology lab, which is as large as a football field. New
buildings are going up everywhere.
At the end of the hour, she pointed me towards the communications office of
the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes. Their most
recent PD pamphlet was one we've had for years, with our very own Millard
Tipp as "cover boy", a picture taken when he was there for one of his many
trips to volunteer for clinical trials. They had "run out" of forms
describing the information for patients volunteering for trials, but were
sure I could find out more from their website.
Visiting there made it all the more tangible what an uphill climb it is to
ensure that PD research is expanded in the big scheme of things. And it
put a human face on a place that had seemed like a fortress: the fact that
the staff there has a terrible parking problem ("all these smart
scientists, and they can't figure out the parking"...), the incongruity of
seeing a "Dunkin Donuts" stand in the NIH cafeteria, the absent-minded
researcher sneezing into his samples in the big lab. Though it would have
been more useful perhaps to have zeroed in on Parkinson's issues, it was
fun to do something "normal" on such a beautiful fall day. The METRO stop
is only a short walk away.
Mary Yost, 51, diagnosed 1990
