Vintage 1950s Four Leaf Clover Rubber Coasters from

My Father suffered from Parkinson Disease . He started with a small tremor in his hand, tha gradually got worse  as the disease progressed. He became bent over  and had troubles walking and moving. His body would not do what his mind wanted. But sometimes, when the moon aligned with Sun or he took his medications in the right way with the right foods, He could walk fine, and the tremor would lessen. It gave us hope into the future for him  and other people suffering with  Parkinson’s .

The Future Is Now. There will be a Cure in my lifetime !

Sergey Brin has funded a study to reseach genotypes of People with Parkinson’s. There will be a database of 10.000 people who have parkinson disease.

From WiredScience(http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/science-as-sear.html)

“On Thursday, 23andMe will announce a project with the Michael J. Fox Foundation and the Parkinson’s Institute and Clinical Center to enroll up to 10,000 people with Parkinson’s Disease, get them genotyped using the 23andMe platform, and issue them a survey to fill in the phenotypic information. That physical “end result” correlation to their genotypic information should make for a rich and fruitful database, ripe for interrogation. With members’ permission, it will be searched and probed for possible correlations and implications.

Ten thousand is a big number for Parkinson’s disease, and researchers hope such a large population will allow them to draw meaningful inferences. (Linda Avey, 23andMe cofounder, describes the effort here).

The idea is to create a genetic database around one disease — Parkinson’s — that is robust enough to answer lots of questions that get into minutiae: If this isn’t a “genetic disease” (typically brought on purely by genetic cause), then what are the fractions of effects caused by our genomes? It’s a complicated question, but if we’re really going to apply predictive medicine, we need to understand all the possible inputs that have ramifications in a multitude of outputs.

This is, in effect, the thing that’s been talked about for about five years now: Googling our genomes. And it’s not surprising that behind this landmark endeavor is Google, or at least its co-founder, Sergey Brin. Brin, who has said he has a genetic risk for Parkinson’s, has funded the study and promised to give 10,000 people their genomic data for just $25 each (the 23andMe service regularly costs about $400). So that’s at least a $4 million commitment, at least at the going rate of genotyping — and that’s not counting the backend research that will take place. Brin will participate in the study.”