In a striking instance of biologists' new prowess at
manipulating human cells, researchers at the Whitehead Institute
in Cambridge have converted skin cells from people with
Parkinson's disease into the general type of neuron that is
destroyed in the disease. The new approach, although it requires
much further work, would in principle allow the brain cells that
are lost in Parkinson's to be replaced with cells that carried
no risk of immune rejection, since they would be the
patients'own. The Whitehead scientists, reporting in yesterday's
issue of the journal CELL, said the method worked in five
patients whose skin cells were transformed in the test tube into
neurons that produce dopamine, a chemical that transmits
messages between neurons in certain regions of the brain. It's
the loss of dopamine-producing nerve cells that leads to the
symptoms of Parkinson's. The immediate goal of the research, led
by Frank Soldner and Rudolf Jaenisch, is to grow the dopamine-
producing cells in the laboratory to seek the ca