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"Do I have a hard head?" asked Nathan Klein. "My wife always says I have a hard head."
"No, it's pretty average," said Dr. Michael G. Kaplitt. "This is one of the few situations in life where you want to be average."
Dr. Kaplitt had just bored a hole about the size of a quarter through the top of Mr. Klein's skull, in preparation for an ambitious experiment: the infusion deep into the brain of 3.5 billion viral particles, each bearing a copy of a human gene meant to help relieve the tremors, shuffling gait and other abnormal movements caused by Parkinson's disease.
Yesterday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Mr. Klein, 55, an independent television producer from Port Washington, N.Y., became the first person to undergo gene therapy for Parkinson's. Despite the checkered history of gene therapy experiments, the Food and Drug Administration approved this procedure for 12 people with severe Parkinson's.
The experiment is a Phase 1 trial, meaning that its main goal is to determine safety, not efficacy. But of course the researchers and their subjects will also be...