Their efforts over the last three years in tying the environment to Parkinson's have yielded significant results so far, and this is no time to stop. But it is not sufficient, as noted above, to only dictate that money be spent - the money must be spent as dictated and it must be spent so as to achieve results. Sometimes it can be harder to keep track of where the money goes than just to spend it - but this is what we must ask our Congressmen and Senators and their staffs to do. As for us, it would be unwise to ask that the money be spent unless we know that there are productive places to put it. Several years ago, that might have seemed over-optimistic.
Scientists seem to hold a lot of hope for stem cell research to provide one possible cure.
Stem cell are those cells which maintain the ability to grow into any of several particular varieties of cell. For example, the fertilized egg is an example of a totipotent stem cell. It divides down, first producing other totipotent stem cells and eventually producing all type of cells in your body. Scientists have learned how to produce many totipotent stem cells from one, and experimentation is taking place to implant these totipotent stem cells into a brain and have them become dopamine producing cells. It's not without problems, but it has been shown to work in some cases.