Twilight of a hero 英文参考文献.docVIP

Comment Twilight of a hero Gregory A Petsko Address: Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454-9110, USA. E-mail: petsko@ Published: 28 September 2004 Genome Biology 2004, 5:116 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2004/5/10/116 ? 2004 BioMed Central Ltd At the height of his fame, he could walk past a monastery in Tibet and Buddhist monks would look up from their prayer wheels, point their bony fingers, and shout out his name. He has always been one of my heroes, not for what he did in the boxing ring (though that was magical, almost more ballet than prizefighting, at least in his early years), but for what he said and did outside of it. In the late 1960s, when, like a lot of other young men, I was trying to prove to people, includ- ing myself, that being against the Vietnam War didn’t neces- sarily mean that you were a coward, he went to jail for refusing to be drafted into what he considered an unjust war (“No Vietcong,” he said memorably, “ever called me a nigger.”). With that gesture, the problem was solved. No one could ever accuse Mohammed Ali of being a coward. attempts by primitive people to explain something that must have seemed an incomprehensible horror. The same fate awaits the actor Michael J. Fox, whose Parkin- son’s Disease is probably the result of some genetic flaw, given that its age of onset was so early. It also awaits Pope John Paul II, whose Parkinson’s appeared in old age, as it most often does. The disease affects around 1% of those over 65; their condition is referred to as idiopathic or ‘sporadic’ Parkinson’s, since no single cause, genetic or otherwise, has been identified. (Like a lot of other ‘sporadic’ disorders, including Type I Diabetes, Alzheimer’s Disease (the non- familial form) and schizophrenia, Parkinson’s Disease is probably pol