When Science Goes Wrong Read Free

that may reflect her educational experience – she was in graduate school in English at both USC and Massachusetts’ Brandeis University, although circumstances prevented her from obtaining a doctorate at either institution.
    Kay told me that at the time she met Max in the summer of 1973, she was working as a teacher in Fresno, California, the city where she was born, but sometimes came down to Los Angeles to visit one of her brothers. On these visits she occasionally dated a colleague of Max’s, but it didn’t work out, and that colleague – whether out of kindness or in order to speed the end of the relationship – set up a blind date for her and Max. Although Max was 11 years older than she – he was 37, and she was 26 – the two hit it off right away. Within a few weeks, they went on a backpacking trip together in the eastern Sierras, and within four months they had married.
    Kay loved Max’s outgoing, light-hearted approach to life and his active lifestyle. Besides backpacking, he introduced her to skiing, which took them to Heavenly Valley at Lake Tahoe, among other locations. Max also continued to run; soon after they married they bought a house in the Hollywood Hills, so Max was able to run in Griffith Park, a slightly healthier environment than the Hollywood Freeway.
    Children were quick in coming: Gene, their eldest son (no doubt named for Max’s older brother) was conceived on their honeymoon and born in August of 1974, and their second son, John, was born two years later. A few months before John was born they moved to a new home in Manhattan Beach.
    One evening in early 1979 when Kay was preparing dinner, she looked through the kitchen window and saw Max walking in from the garage as usual – but he was dragging one of his feet as he walked. Kay didn’t think much of it; she knew that Max had injured that foot sometime during his running career. But it kept on happening, and after a few weeks it became his regular style of walking. Then she noticed something else: when she kissed Max goodbye in the morning, she saw that he had failed to shave a small part of his face, up by one ear. Max himself noticed problems. He had trouble raising his arms to wash his hair in the shower, and he also had voice problems. On one occasion when he was on his lunch break, he saw an old friend across the street and tried to shout his name but no sound came out of his throat. These symptoms alarmed him, but he said nothing to Kay about them at the time and he minimised the significance of the symptoms that she herself had noticed.
    A few months later, one of Max’s hands began to shake – a steady tremor that showed itself most when his arm was at rest. One of Max’s legal colleagues noticed the tremor and recommended that Max go see a doctor. He did so, and as a result Max was admitted to Encino Hospital. ‘They ran all manner of tests on him,’ said Kay, ‘and on Thursday of that week they told us that it was Parkinson’s disease.’
    At the time he was diagnosed, Max didn’t know much about Parkinson’s disease, but Kay was well aware that it was a progressive and potentially fatal disorder of movement. ‘There had been a man in our church who had had it,’ she said. ‘You could just see him diminish. I knew it was very serious.’
    The central biological process that causes the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease is thought to be the death of a set of brain cells that produce a neurotransmitter, or signalling molecule, called dopamine. These cells are located in a small region of the brainstem called the substantia nigra or ‘black substance’ – so-called because these cells are heavily pigmented. The cells have extensions called axons that run from the substantia nigra to the striatum, a structure higher up in the brain that helps to generate body movements. (More accurately, there are two striatums, one in the left and one in the right hemisphere of the brain.) The tips of the axons – the synapses –