by Paul Ranalli

About the author: Paul Ranalli is a neurologist at the University of Toronto and a member of the advisory council of the deVeber Institute for Bioethics and Social Research.

The hugely unimpressive outcome of a four-year-long clinical trial that injected brain tissue harvested from aborted babies in an attempt to treat Parkinson’s disease was well hidden in recent reports in the mainstream media. Indeed, just reading the headlines of the findings, presented in Toronto at the 1999 annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology, the reader could altogether miss how abysmal were the results of the controversial surgery.

For example, Parkinson’s is a disease in which the overwhelming majority of patients are senior citizens. Yet the controversial fetal transplants were found to be ineffective for anyone over 60 years of...