Michele Basso

Basso recently ran into problems when she decided to repair one of the head caps she had bolted to a monkey's skull. The monkey had complications as Michele fiddled with the head wounds. She didn't have a key to the first aid cabinet and the monkey died.

Then other monkeys started dying. An internal investigation revealed that when she screwed the head caps to the monkeys' skulls, she sometimes picked up the wrong screw or drove the screw into the monkeys' skulls too deeply. They developed brain abscesses.

Michele claims that nearly everything she does in her lab is done to humans in hospitals. Maybe, but medical doctors get sued for malpractice or thrown out of the profession when they screw up like Michele.

Michele recently claimed in a videoed public meeting that L-dopa, a drug used to treat Parkinson's disease – which she claims to be studying – was a direct result of monkey experiments. But L-dopa is the result of a very famous, much written about discovery made by studying the brains of Parkinson's sufferers who had died.

What Basso must not have known:

The discovery of the dopamine deficit in the Parkinson brain
Oleh Hornykiewicz

Early in 1959, a study was started, in Vienna, of DA [dopamine] in PD [Parkinson’s Disease] and normal human (postmortem) brain. Within a short period of time, we analyzed 17 adult control brains and 14 cases with various extrapyramidal (basal ganglia) conditions, including 6 cases with PD. Of the 14 pathological cases, only the 6 cases with PD showed a profound loss of DA in the caudate nucleus and putamen. This discovery, published in 1960, is today part of the firmly established textbook knowledge. The immediate consequence of this discovery was the initiation in 1961, also in Vienna, of therapeutic (i.v.) L-dopa trials in PD patients. These clinical trials demonstrated L-dopa’s unusually strong antiparkinson potential and established the concept of DA replacement, thus being the beginning of the L-dopa era of PD.