A First Class Medical Mystery.

Neurologist William Langston. His work plunged him into a medical mystery, and a hot political controversy about the ethics of medicine. In 1982 Langston was called in to examine a number of "frozen" patients, young men and women in the San Francisco Bay Area who suddenly could neither move or speak, though conscious. Langston recognized the signs of Parkinson's disease, and determined that these patients had all used the same batch of tainted heroin. Langston prescribed L-dopa, a treatment for Parkinson's which only provided short-term relief. Then he prescribed a daring new medical procedure: fetal-tissue transplant, and his patients recovered. Langston's new book (co-written by Jon Palfreman) is The Case of the Frozen Addicts: How the solution of an extraordinary medical mystery spawned a revolution in the understanding and treatment of Parkinson's disease (Pantheon).