Yep.

Yeah, so well, first of all, it's an honor to serve.

The council members, as congressionally mandated, have to be drawn from a broad scope, including persons with disease, including young onset, including some of the other Parkinsonian syndromes, including psychiatry, gerontology.

And so I think the representation has to be broad.

But the real core of this is it's a chance for us to create an inflection point for Parkinson's.

So an inflection point is where we're traveling along in the same sort of direction.

You're kind of transferring along on that family car trip, and you know exactly where you're going and everything.

I think we could do exactly the same thing for targeting.

When you do biopsies and you're finding toxins and heavy metals in the brains, like what's happening?

Yeah.

And you're absolutely, you know, spot on when you talk about leaky gut, too.

And it turns out the gut is also a, a, a pathway, you know, where you can hitchhike in and potentially cause Parkinson as well.

And we talk about now brain first Parkinson and gut first Parkinson.

And, uh, and so this leakiness, you know, this permeability to, you know, to stress and, and other factors that can get across is really important.

So if you think about the brain as having like a force field, if you're a Star Wars fan, you know, it's kinda got like a force field.

And misfolded.

Could you explain that goal in your own words?

Yeah.

So, you know, one of the things that we didn't wanna do was, you know, write another book, both with Ending Parkinson and The Parkinson Plan, where we, you know, you write the whole thing and you're like, "Okay," like, "what do I," you know, you're like, "How do," you're like, "What are the couple of things I need to do for prevention? What are the things?" So we really wanted to, to say, "Okay, let's force ourselves into actionable goals, things that we can, that we believe that we can achieve." So the framework that we came up with, uh, driven, you know, mostly by Ray Dorsey and his, and his background with McKinsey and thinking about these things in a different way.

So the, the framework as we went back and forth that we agreed was we should go for a, a 0% rise in Parkinson by 2035, so that was the zero, and at least 10 times increase in research funding with a proportionate amount to prevention, so you get past the two cents out of every, you know, dollar, okay? You know, toward, we need a proportional investment.

But we also knew from studying HIV-Um, polio and, uh, different cancers.

We knew in our, in our last several projects that the amount of funding is 10 or 15 times less than what we need to move other diseases, so we just can't, we, we can't have our scientists fighting for scraps.

Like, we've got to have there, enough out there, 'cause it's gonna take a lot of failures to get to a lot of successes.

I know it's more about prevention, but yeah, maybe you could-

Why are the diagnoses, uh, increasing so rapidly nationwide, doubling in six years, a 2X increase in six years? Is it, is it just better testing?

Yeah, so a lot of folks have speculated as to why this may be, and there's certainly an important dialogue that's happening now.

And now Parkinson's is actually growing faster than Alzheimer's disease, and the Global Burden of Disease study, which is a study sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has showed us these skyrocketing numbers.

And so we no longer believe that it's just because people aren't getting diagnosed, people are getting diagnosed earlier, and as we get better, that we're just seeing more of these cases.

We believe that there are other factors.

And when we think about Florida, we think about the citrus industry, we think about chemicals, we think about pesticides, and we think about this all over the world.

And so these environmental factors are really important.

Hmm.

In fact, a patient that Michael and I, uh, both saw recently, um, grew up, uh, went to high school in, uh, the Central Valley of California and was likely drinking well water and may have had his, uh, Parkinson's disease due to that.

Yeah, one thing to add that's really, I think, important for people to appreciate is we are entering an age where folks are beginning to care, and it's all about the dialogue.

And so when we talk about the information and people read the book, and they say, "I got angry." And you say, say, you know, "Why did you get angry?" "It's 'cause I didn't know." And when you start to look at the studies and you start to say, okay, well, you have one study that says maybe this pesticide, this chemical, this exposure to air is associated with Parkinson's or other diseases, that's one study.

And when we begin to look over a period of time, and I call it the drip, drip, drip of science, you know, where you get one, one paper after another paper, and then they start to occur in different regions, and then they start to occur in different countries.

And then people start to say, "Okay, well maybe we should look at all of these clusters of people." And one of the things that I regret the most early in my career, you know, people would come to me, you know, over two decades ago, and they would say, "You know, I have Parkinson's.

My neighbor across the street has Parkinson's.

You know, the, the guy on the next street.

Have you guys heard of that, and how effective has that been for people?

Michael, does the fact that it starts in the nose suggest that it is triggered by something we are breathing in?

Yeah, so there are a number of theories on this, and it's not just the nose.

So the nose would be one path to the potential start of Parkinson's.

The other is the gut, and, and people talk about this as brain first, so coming through the nose, or gut first, actually coming through, you know, through the stomach and through your gut, and we find these abnormal protein clumps that you talked about in both places.

And one of the real, um, amazing and mysterious things about Parkinson's is when we look at the genetics of Parkinson's, about thirteen to fifteen people out of every hundred have a single piece of DNA that is abnormal or mutated, and that causes their Parkinson's, but the vast majority of people don't have that single mutation.

And so we are now shifting a lot of our science, a lot of our effort, a lot of our research toward trying to understand what environmental factors and environmental influences might be impacting Parkinson's, why it starts-... why it spreads, why it progresses, and there are two [chuckles] areas that have really, um, you know, raised up in our, in our, our radar of what could be going on.

One is, uh, is air pollution, and the other is, um, pesticides and water.

Michael, what about you? Are you optimistic?