Michael J. Fox

[Smilla]

Count me in as someone who saw this thread kicked to the top and went, "Oh, shit, no." Glad to read Mr. Fox is still with us.

[Ginger]

I have been looking for podcasts and nonfiction audiobooks to listen to while I walk, so I just started Michael's autobiography. I love that Michael jumps right in with 40 minutes of Parkinson's diagnosis, his wedding, his marriage, his career problems in the early 90s, his stalker. I hate it when celebrities make me suffer through stories from their ordinary childhoods. I don't care about their favorite uncle or what elementary school was like. Get to the good stuff.

[Neurochick]

I met him about 16 years ago. He's a great guy.

Eventually there will be a cure for Parkinson's, and it will be largely because of his foundation; I worked with researchers who got grant money from his foundation.

[lordofthefries]

Nov 23, 2020 12:45:24 GMT -4 Neurochick said:

I met him about 16 years ago. He's a great guy.

Eventually there will be a cure for Parkinson's, and it will be largely because of his foundation; I worked with researchers who got grant money from his foundation.

Michael J. Fox has been a tremendous, tremendous resource for Parkinson's, and his foundation has spent hundreds of millions in research funding. But I didn't want to let this statement go without contextualizing - that's still a drop in the bucket compared to the funding provided by the NIH, which is on the orders of billions over years and funds the training of nearly every scientist who goes through graduate school and post-doctoral training in the U.S. I appreciate the work and contribution of celebrities like Fox (another example is Dolly Parton re: recent Moderna vaccine research funding), but let's not give them an undue level of credit, particularly when the research funding that really drives U.S. innovation is continually under attack by politicians. It cannot be replaced by private charity.