Serendipity and a Cure for Parkinson's Disease

On August 14, 2018 my mother, Gara Anderson, died from complications due to Parkinson's disease.  Aunt Athalee, her sister, had died seven months earlier on January 11, 2018.  Here, they are pictured while they awaited chelation therapy in St. Martinville the previous year.

Athalee Dupre and Gara Anderson

Today in the news I came across an article article that read, "Moreover, even though the PTB-silencing treatment was only administered once, the mice did not show any symptoms of Parkinson’s disease for the remainder of their lifetime."

I hope this leads very quickly to a treatment leading to a cure for these terrible diseases so that those suffering now may be whole again.

Accidental discovery leads to Parkinson’s disease cure in mice

"Once researchers realized that they could easily create neurons from other types of cells, they decided to see if the method could be used to treat neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease. In Parkinson’s, dopamine cells in the brain die. Thus, to assess their method, the researchers used a chemical that poisons dopamine neurons and creates symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in mice.

After using the chemical to kill dopamine neurons in the mice, researchers silenced PTB. They found that 30% of astrocytes turned into neurons. Moreover, these newly generated neurons seemed to grow normally and even began to send connections to other parts of the brain, like normal neurons.

When the researchers looked at mouse behavior, they also found that silencing PTB completely restored movement function. Moreover, even though the PTB-silencing treatment was only administered once, the mice did not show any symptoms of Parkinson’s disease for the remainder of their lifetime.

“I was stunned at what I saw,” said study co-author Dr. William Mobley, Distinguished Professor of Neurosciences at UCSD’s School of Medicine. “This whole new strategy for treating neurodegeneration gives hope that it may be possible to help even those with advanced disease.”"

https://www.studyfinds.org/accidental-discovery-leads-to-parkinsons-disease-cure-in-mice/

Now You Have Seen it All

Yes, that is a real cuttlefish and it is trained to wear 3-D glasses.

"Cuttlefish catch a meal by deploying their tentacles and, to be successful in their strike, cuttlefish must compute depth to position themselves at the correct distance from the prey. If they are too close, the prey may be spooked and escape; too far and the tentacles will not reach.

To test how the cuttlefish brain computes distance to an object, the team trained cuttlefish to wear 3-D glasses and strike at images of two walking shrimp, each a different color displayed on a computer screen at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass."

Video at the link:

https://phys.org/news/2020-01-d-movies-reveal-cuttlefish-distance.html

Only Two Ways to Defeat a Virus: Natural Immunity and Vaccines

"A virus is not a miasma, a cootie, or red goo like in the children’s book Cat in the Hat. There is no path toward waging much less winning a national war against a virus. It cares nothing about borders, executive orders, and titles. A virus is a thing to battle one immune system at a time, and our bodies have evolved to be suited to do just that. Vaccines can give advantage to the immune system through a clever hack. Even so, there will always be another virus and another battle, and so it’s been for hundreds of thousands of years.

If you read the above carefully, you now know more than you would know from watching 50 TED talks on viruses by Bill Gates."
 (...)
"“Communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.”

And that’s what we did for the one hundred years following the catastrophic Spanish flu of 1918. We never again attempted widespread closures or lockdown precisely because they had failed so miserably in the few places they were attempted.


The cooties theory attempted a comeback with the Swine flu of 2009 (H1N1) but the world was too busy dealing with a financial crisis so the postwar strategy of virus control and mitigation prevailed once again, thankfully. But then the perfect storm hit in 2020 and a new generation of virus mitigators got their chance to conduct a grand social experiment based on computer modeling and forecasting."

https://www.aier.org/article/smart-society-stupid-people/

Democrats Want the Nation to Forget

A statue of the Confederate commander, Richard W. Dowling. is removed in Houston, on Wednesday.Credit...Callaghan O'Hare/Reuters

Here is a reminder

H/T: https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/

Science vs Pseudo-Science

H/T: https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/

Politics and Medicine are a Bad Mix

After President Trump suggested that you might ask your doctor about a treatment for the Kung Flu that involved hydroxychloroquine, his political enemies, which include much of televised media and some pharmaceutical boards swung into action in order to suppress the treatments.

Anecdotal accounts, otherwise known as data or evidence, from doctors showed that using hydroxychloroquine along with zinc and Z-Paks were effective treatments for the Kung Flu.

"A major medical magazine has retracted a study it published that claimed to have found increased mortality in coronavirus patients who took the drug hydroxychloroquine.
The Lancet issued the retraction Thursday afternoon after successive days of questions regarding the study and the data underpinning it, both of which came from the medical analytics company Surgisphere.

That study, published on May 22, determined that hydroxychloroquine – a drug repeatedly touted by President Trump as a possible viable treatment for the coronavirus – was "associated with an increased risk of in-hospital mortality" when given to COVID-19 patients. Those conclusions so alarmed the World Health Organization that it announced at the end of last month that it would be pausing its own hydroxychloroquine trials "while the data is reviewed by the Data Safety Monitoring Board."


Yet on Thursday, The Lancet issued a notice that "three of the authors of the paper ... have retracted their study. They were unable to complete an independent audit of the data underpinning their analysis. As a result, they have concluded that they 'can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources'." ""
https://justthenews.com/nation/science/concerns-mount-over-hydroxychloroquine-study-caused-who-halt-drug-trials

Bastille Day

We did not overthrow one tyrant only to have another put in place.


Geddy Lee's parents met in Auschwitz.