Scientists and Others—Hornykiewiecz and Parkinsons

Ocean County Observer

May 21 1984

Many people believe that the greatest contributions to medical science emanate from doctors or biologists, physiologists or pharmacologists. But not so. It was milkmaids that clued Jenner into vaccination, and morphine was drafted into medicine after some housewives noted that poppy seed extract, which gave rise to morphine, made a great soup with which to quiet the kids for the afternoon nap. Digitalis was extracted from foxglove and the Indians did a job on cinchona bark to derive predecessors of quinine.

Two firemen put together the clues that led to the discovery of the Extra Strength Tylenol tampering, and a retired legionnaire provided the clues that led to the discovery of Legionnaire’s disease.

Not too long ago medical science got a big lift from the male homosexual community in which AIDS dwells. Now the street people are helping again, giving a big boost to medical science by providing the chemical that will help create an experimental model of Parkinson’s Disease.

Parkinson’s Disease is a unique malady. It is seen commonly in the elderly as a result of degenerative changes in two areas of the brain, the substantia nigra, a black body rich in the precursor of DOPA (which palliates the symptoms of Parkinson’s) and it was also seen in middle aged in droves about 20 years after the great encephalitis epidemic that followed the fatal flu of 1918. The virus of encephalitis became dormant for 20 years and when it finally came back to life it found itself in the substantia nigra which it promptly nibbled at until symptom of Parkinson’s developed.

In 1957 a young Ph.D. scientist, whose name is ignored in the medical literature, (Hornykiewicz, a Pole working in Austria) proved that DOPA, an eventual product of the substantia nigra, was present in inadequate quantities in patients with Parkinson’s, and he suggested that DOPA be artificially supplied. Most of the credit for this epochal change in the treatment of Parkinson’s went to George Cooties MD, then at Brookhaven National Laboratories who performed the clinical trials that proved Hornykiewiecz to have been correct.

Lo and behold, just as the medical community pats itself on the back because of its contributions to the study of Parkinson’s, street addicts (angels with dusted dirty faces) started coming down with a severe form of Parkinson’s that resulted from a contaminating chemical in the drugs they were shooting up. The first case occurred (as reported in Science May 13, 1984) in a young chemist who had been an addict since age 13 and who tried to fabricate meperidine in his home laboratory. After a few batches, he tried to speed up the process and inadvertently produced something called NMPTP (otherwise known as N – methyl-4 phenyl-1236 tetra-hydro-pyridine, which selectively destroys cells of the substantia nigra. Since then several other street addicts have taken contaminated stuff and ended up with Parkinson’s or a dead ringer. The main fallout of these remarkable events is that the chemical when given to monkeys produces Parkinson-like symptoms, so an animal model of this disease is finally available. So much the worse for monkeys who by and large deserve a better fate. And perhaps so much the better for Parkinson victims; and of course three cheers for the unfortunate addicts whose last defiant anti-social act was to create for mankind and the science of medicine a means for probing, and perhaps curing the dread Parkinson’s disease.