verdant and peaceful world. with additional support for this program from the corporation for public broadcasting. >> reach all the way down to the floor without moving your feet. >> narrator: living with parkinson's disease, a story frontline correspondent dave iverson and his family know firsthand. >> i hadn't thought that it would happen, but it has happened. >> narrator: parkinson's affects a million americans. >> i have a mindset that i am going to not let this blanking parkinson's get me down. >> narrator: and it's been front and center in the debate over embryonic stem cell science. >> this bill would support the taking of innocent human life, so i vetoed it. >> you know, when you're talking about the potential to heal and cure so many and it not going forward, it pissed me off, and i wanted to do something. >> narrator: now the politics have changed, but the quest for a cure continues. >> how close are we? we're a lot closer than we were ten years ago, a lot closer. >> narrator: tonight on frontline, correspondent dave iverson tracks the pursuit of parkinson's, and his own family journey. >> narrator: it isn't dramatic. it's a disease of inches: a hand starts to shake; a step becomes a shuffle; life in gradual slow motion. parkinson's arrives without fanfare. you're jogging at the gym one day, and you notice that one arm isn't swinging the same as the other. in time, other signs accumulate: a leg starts to tingle, a finger trembles. none of it seems like a big deal, so you keep living your life. >> and we will take your calls when we come back. if you'd like to join in our conversation about faith and politics, you can call us now... >> narrator: for me, that meant continuing to host radio and tv shows in san francisco... one of the issues that's come up in this campaign. ...and doing my best to ignore what wouldn't go away. it took two years before that odd collection of symptoms formed a whole diagnosis. i had parkinson's, and it was about to send my life in a new direction. it's not the worst diagnosis. right now, i'm doing fine. >> cross your fingers. thumbs up. press. >> narrator: but as everyone in this parkinson's exercise class told me, the disease is a relentless foe, handing out its challenges one by one. >> stretch your arms... >> there's something about the inevitability of it. parkinson's is a very gradual disease, but inevitably it's going to get you. >> lift your eyes. >> you go through a period of adjusting when you realize that your life is going to be different than you had imagined. >> narrator: life changes for parkinson's patients when a key neurotransmitter called dopamine goes missing. >> put your hands inside your knees. >> narrator: dopamine is like the oil that lubricates your motor system. without it, muscles stiffen, arms shake. sometimes you stutter and stop. >> by counting your steps, you break up that festination problem. >> one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. >> narrator: drugs help for a while, and a new surgical technique called deep brain stimulation can relieve symptoms for several years. >> and go, and go, and go. >> narrator: but the disease is progressive, and there is no cure. >> roll to your right. >> narrator: tom shearer has had parkinson's for 15 years, and early on he coped well. >> things had been going very well, and then all of sudden, out of the blue, i disintegrated. and it suddenly occurred to me that this was not a battle that i was going to win. >> look back behind you, then look back behind you over here, then look back behind you over there. >> narrator: is parkinson's a winnable battle? it's a question i've thought about ever since i got my own diagnosis, in part because it made me think about my dad. my father was a man with an easy smile and a ready wit, and to his great good fortune, he had quite a partner at his side, my now 96-year-old mother, adelaide. >> it's such a natural picture, really. >> narrator: yeah, well, i don't think he would have been posing like that. >> well, who knows? you remember he was the lone ranger once. >> narrator: my father was a performer at heart, and my parents married not long after he'd finished a stint in radio, working on the original "lone ranger." >> hi-ho, silver, away! >> narrator: i love this letter from his broadcasting company. >> oh, this is a wonderful letter. read it. >> narrator: "it's with regret that we learn that bill is considering the completion of his course, as he has a fine voice, good vocabulary, and an instantaneous mind." i always loved that phrase, "an instantaneous mind." my dad left broadcasting to become a teacher, but the spoken word remained central to who he was. language was his gift, a gift that began slipping away in the fall of 1971. >> i was walking with him, and i thought he was holding his hand, just not in an ordinary wa1:[4g' it was... >> narrator: it was the first sign of parkinson's, a condition that not only steals movement, it can rob you of something more. >> he was mostly concerned about his voice, because he did have a good voice, and that/z deteriorated gradually.]!/ráéjr toward the end, he really couldn't talk. >> narrator: do you think that was the hardest thing for him? >> hardest, by far the hardest thing. it was harder than not moving, actually, i think, in many ways. >> there he is. >> narrator: there he is. >> poetry in motion. >> narrator: my brother, peter. like siblings everywhere, we've talked about how we grew up, what we took from our parents, including how our dad dealt with parkinson's. >> i think he conveyed to us in one way or another a sense about life in general being a fragile enterprise. i think he was one of those people who, you know... an immigrant's son who said, "no excuses, no whining, get to work." pow! >> narrator: that's a pretty good kick. >> it is a pretty good kick. >> narrator: like my dad, peter became a teacher, and in the summer of 1992, 20 years after my dad's diagnosis, he, too, felt the same first signals of the disease. do you remember having a sort of sense of foreboding about that? >> i think that's it. there had been too many signs, too many physical manifestations, too many indications to think otherwise. it's always there. it's one of the first things you think about in the morning and one of the last things you think about at night, and it says to you, you know, take advantage of the time you have. you work a little harder, and you realize the timetable is not the same. >> narrator: do you remember the conversation that you and i had when i called you up and told you that i had been diagnosed as well? >> yeah, i do remember that. >> narrator: do you remember what you said to me? >> mercifully, i don't, but i'm about to be reminded, i think. >> narrator: no, i've always remembered it. you said to me, "we'll just have to fight this together." >> i do remember. >> narrator: my father, my brother, and me: we share a common journey. and now i find myself wondering about the road ahead: what i might learn, and what might slip away. >> put your hands closer to your chest, but don't touch your fingers. >> narrator: given my family story, i couldn't help but wonder if parkinson's was genetic. >> look here, and look here. >> narrator: so i enrolled in a study at jacksonville's mayo clinic. until recently, the idea that your dna might cause parkinson's was considered unlikely. but geneticists like the mayo clinic's dr. matthew farrer are now taking a closer look at the role of the family tree. >> there were no genetics in parkinson's ten years ago, none. this century, the 21st century, it's genetics. the genetics provides molecular clues, rational clues, as to what's going on in the disease process. >> narrator: in the past ten years, farrer and other geneticists have foufmb that cause parkinson's in six different genes, and they're looking for more. >> just tell me about your family, and i can just draw them in. >> narrator: okay. so there is me, and i have parkinson's. >> all right. >> narrator: and so does one of my brothers, and my father had parkinson's. and beyond individual family ties, geneticists are now tracking parkinson's genes in whole populations. >> it's my understanding that you come from norway. your background is norwegian? >> narrator: yeah, my grandfather was born in norway, in larvik, norway. >> grandfather on which side? >> narrator: my father's side. in 2004, mayo scientists helped discover the most common parkinson's mutation in the lrrk-2 gene. they've now traced it to several locations, including north africa, near the ancient site of carthage, and, oddly enough, to my ancestral home, the coast of norway. >> it spread to norway, we think, because of viking occupation. there were some vikings living in and around carthage at around 1000 ad, and this particular mutation is quite common on the northern coastline of norway. >> narrator: my grandfather's birthplace is on the norwegian coast, next door to norway's first viking settlement. so did my own family's parkinson's saga begin a thousand years ago, when some seafaring relative came calling in carthage? >> with your particular description of your disease and your family history and origin, there's quite a high chance, i would think, that you have a genetic form of the disease. >> narrator: quite a high chance, though still not certain. but oddly enough, that possibility might bring a bit of family luck, and here's why. this is a graphic representation of the lrrk-2 gene, the gene in question, and it offers researchers a readymade target for fixing the disease. farrer thinks the key is repairing what he calls the gene's "faulty doorway." it's the hinge of that door that you want to... >> that's broken. >> narrator: that's broken. >> that's broken in lrrk-2, yeah. the hinge is broken in lrrk-2. the door is always open. >> narrator: and the thought would be to create a drug that could close the door? >> actually fill the doorway. get in the way. >> narrator: finding a drug that would fix the mutation would be great news for potentially affected families like mine, but parkinson's usually appears out of nowhere, with no family ties in sight. so besides genes, there must be something else that jump-starts the disease. one theory first made news more than 20 years ago. >> first, a background report on parkinson's disease by dave iverson of public station whaa, madison, wisconsin. >> narrator: and in one of life's little ironies, it was a story that i had covered, too. this is what's known about parkinson's disease: it's progressive, and it's incurable. back in the mid-1980s, i had reported on the work of a young stanford neurologist named bill langston, who had come across something startling that seemed to cause parkinson's. now, more than 20 years later, i've headed back to bill langston's parkinson's institute. since the 1980s, langston and his team have investigated whether environmental toxins might trigger the disease, a quest that began with a most unusual patient. >> it really started with my getting called to see a patient who had developed parkinson's literally over two or three days. and he was young; that's not typical. it came on quickly; that's not typical. so he was a true medical mystery. >> can you raise this hand up at all? can you raise that hand up? >> he was literally frozen like a statue. >> i can see you trying. >> so i knew instantly we had a neurologic condition on our hands, but what? we had no idea. >> narrator: what langston and his team were about to discover would turn the parkinson's world upside down. >> in taking history, we asked him if he was on any medications, and to our shock, he wrote the word "heroin"-- not a traditional medication, but that was our fist clue. we were eventually able to figure out that there was a tainted heroin on the streets in northern california, and that this heroin was probably the most selective brain toxin ever discovered. after these addicts shot up, it went straight into the brain like a nike missile and literally killed the same cells in the brain that died in parkinson's, and we had literally instant parkinson's disease. >> can you stand up? let's try to stand up. >> narrator: but did this condition really equate to normal parkinson's? one test would be to see whether standard parkinson's drugs would help. >> can you hop up and down? >> the results were truly dramatic. it literally brought these patients back to life. >> your left foot, your right foot. >> narrator: but just a half- hour later, the parkinson's medication begins to wear off, and soon, the patient is back to his frozen state. >> how do you feel now? >> ( mumbling ) >> you can't move? >> narrator: langston now knew a street drug could cause a parkinson's-like condition. but what the scientists discovered next radically altered the nature of parkinson's research. it turned out that the synthetic heroin, mptp, had a chemical makeup strikingly similar to a widely used herbicide, paraquat. >> that was an "aha!" moment, because if here a compound could cause all of the motor symptoms of parkinson's was also very, very chemically similar to an herbicide that's widely used, it really raised the question how many of those things are out there. we now are hunting, specifically looking for chemicals, one or more chemicals in the environment, that might play a role in parkinson's disease. >> narrator: the findings galvanized the scientific community. researchers began looking into whether parkinson's was caused by a variety of environmental triggers, and history seemed to support that approach. scientists knew that parkinson's hadn't even appeared in the medical literature until 1817, the beginning of the industrial revolution, when toxins were first being poured into the environment. they now wondered if parkinson's could be, at least in part, a modern disease, triggered by toxins like mptp. >> i think it's a very exciting time for research in this disease. and for patients with parkinson's disease, and their families, that's good news. thank you very much. we had real hope that this would solve the disease. and i thought three to four years we would have the answer. in fact, in three to four years, we did have an answer, and that probably was that mptp itself was not the cause of parkinson's. >> narrator: not the cause, but a key clue. indeed, recent studies have built on langston's initial breakthrough, showing that pesticide exposure can increase disease risk by as much as 70%. and many scientists now think genes and the environment might actually work hand in hand to cause most parkinson's, with certain genes triggering the disease only when a toxic exposure takes place. >> there's an old saying that genetics loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger, and that may be the case in parkinson's. we still don't have a smoking gun, that's for sure, but that's what we're looking for. >> narrator: and so the time- consuming hunt for what causes parkinson's continues. but time, of course, is what people with parkinson's can least afford. for them, the quest that matters most is the search for a cure. >> when i first met peter, he was a man who was truly suffering. okay, that's good. he's a thoughtful, intelligent man, but he had some real periods of disability. and he was really desperate and hopeful that we could do something to kind of give him his life back. okay, peter. >> i actually didn't know how bad it was until i saw myself. and i felt like somebody should take me out and shoot me. i didn't know that i had gone downhill that much. >> narrator: in 1999, canadian peter sauer went to see a team of specialists in halifax, nova scotia. his symptoms could no longer be controlled by parkinson's drugs. the halifax team, led by dr. ivar mendez and harvard neuroscientist ole isacson, was trying to refine a controversial procedure they hoped would lead to a cure: a fetal brain cell transplant. >> what we're learning is how to reconstruct the brain. cells can actually be put back into the brain. they can grow new connections and release this transmitter, this chemical, dopamine, in a natural and appropriate way. >> narrator: the idea was to restart dopamine production by taking fetal neural cells, derived from aborted tissue, and transplanting them into a patient's brain. >> now we talk about the concept of brain repair. brain repair, you know, when i was in medical school, which is really not that long ago, was not even something that was thought about. so we have advanced tremendously to understand that we can potentially repair the brain. >> narrator: but would brain repair work for peter sauer? >> you can see here very clearly... >> narrator: images taken of a brain from an early transplant recipient were promising. >> from this bunch of cells, you can see these little wiggly, brown fibers that are growing and restoring that area of the brain that is affected by parkinson's disease. >> narrator: by way of comparison, here's the same section of the brain from a parkinson's patient who did not have a transplant. here, there's no evidence of brain cell activity at all. there's nothing going on there. >> yeah, there's nothing going on. >> narrator: the microscopic evidence is compelling, but the evidence in person is stunning. here's peter sauer at the age of 65, as seen without medication prior to his transplant. and here's peter sauer, age 72, without medication today. >> you look really fantastic, peter. >> i don't know what to say. i feel fantastic. i turned out to be the wunderkind. i don't know why that is. >> today i see a man who is full of life and energy. i'd actually have a hard time keeping up with peter. when i see things like that, and i remember the way patients were before the surgery, it's like witnessing a miracle, because you see they really do have their lives back. it's quite something to witness. >> narrator: but for people with parkinson's, the hope engendered by stories like peter sauer's proved short-lived. a year after peter's procedure, a series of fetal transplants at the university of colorado, utilizing a different surgical technique than the halifax team, yielded deeply disappointing results. while some recipients showed modest improvement, others wound up far worse, unable to even control their own bodies. >> even though some patients recovered, some patients recovered too much. in other words, they started to show excessive movements rather than just enough. so instead of being helped, they were actually made worse. >> narrator: it was a demoralizing setback, and, despite the halifax success, served to largely freeze the field of fetal transplants in its place. >> there's an old saying in science that research is the process of going up alleys to see if they're blind. and more often than not, they are. but that's what we do. >> narrator: meanwhile, the clock ticks. this year, some 50,000 people in the united states will wake up and sense something's wrong. they're more likely to be men than women, more likely to be people my age. but sometimes that unwelcome wakeup call arrives when you're young, when your career is just taking off. >> since you're obviously not a patient and i'm not getting anywhere, can you tell me where i can find a guy named lou who drives an ambulance, and i'll get out of your life. >> i'm lou. >> i was doing a film in florida and was partying pretty good, and was used to waking up not in great shape. but i woke up one morning, and my pinky was twitching, and it was just persistent. and i just... i realized that there was just nothing i could do to stop it. and i thought, is this like dts? who gets dts in a pinky? you know, with a lot of injury or a lot of catastrophic illness, it's like stepping off a curb and getting hit by a bus. but with parkinson's, it's like actually being stuck in the middle of the road while a bus is coming, and you can hear it, you