billboards with earnest-faced injury lawyers, but an intrepid surgeon in
another country could be the one to perform the breakthrough operation.
Alim Louis Benabid (1942–)is a French neurosurgeon in the small city
of Grenoble, nestled at the base of the Alps near the Italian border.
Grenoble has become one of Europe’s most important research and tech
centers, and its most important science and engineering schools is
Université Joseph Fourier (UJF). Benabid had the unusual distinction of
holding a PhD degree in physics and an MD from UJF, ideally preparing
him for a biophysics revolution.
Although the drug levodopa had significantly improved the lives of
hundreds of thousands of PD patients, it tended to lose its efficacy after
about five years, and even in patients who benefited from the medicine,
there were meaningful side-effects. Dr. Benabid was still performing
lesioning operations throughout the 1980s, always targeting the thalamus
in the brains of severely affected PD patients. The usual technique
involved carefully positioning an awake patient on an operating table, her
head carefully secured with clamps that would hold the skull perfectly
still. A small drill hole was made at the top of the head, and a long needle
stealthily inserted deep into the brain under the guidance of live X-rays.
With the complex anatomy of the brain held in consideration, a small
electrical impulse was then delivered to the deeply positioned needle
electrode. Aiming for the central thalamus, “If you are just a little bit
posterior, you are in the sensory thalamus and the patient feels a tingling;
if you are too lateral you are in the pyramidal tract and the patient exhibits
contractions of the hand or face.”^30 Placing the electrode in the wrong
location could paralyze a patient, so the mimicking of neural firing with
low frequency impulses was critical.
One day in 1987, in his Grenoble operating room, Benabid asked a
question, not surprising for a physicist: what would happen if I changed
the electrical frequency of the probe? Benabid conducted an experiment on
an elderly patient who suffered from a severe tremor. Once the probe was
in the correct location, he began altering the frequency. “I explored the
effect from very low frequency—1, 5, 10 Hz, etc.—up to 100 Hz, and this
is how I got lucky.” All of a sudden, without losing other neurologic
function, merely by changing the electric frequency of the probe, the
Parkinson’s victim had complete cessation of his tremors. “At 100 Hz, we