L-Dopa

Today we would find it difficult to place ourselves in the position of the physician or the patient prior to the L-DOPA era of Parkinson’s Disease (PD). David Marsden, the eminent British neurologist, neuroscientist and PD researcher of the second half of the last century and an eyewitness to that historical turning point, paints with few brush strokes, as it were, a vivid, telling picture of that period: “... Before the 1960s the clinical features and basic neuropathology of the disorder had been established, anticholinergic drugs and stereotaxic surgery were popular, but the illness progressed relentlessly and was the cause of miserable disability... The discovery of selective striatal dopamine deficiency in the parkinsonian brain in the early 1960s changed everything [ 1 ]”. This paper by Oleh Hornykiewicz recounts the remarkable mixture of science, intrigue and politics behind the author’s work in the 1950s and early 1960s that triggered the modern era of Parkinson’s disease research: the discovery of the dopamine deficit in the brain of patients with Parkinson’s disease.