When Science Goes Wrong by Simon Levay Page A

happened and saw Folkerth and Durso’s published report. She was of course surprised to learn that none of the foetal brain cells had survived, and shocked to see the photographs of the nodules, hair, and other foetal tissues that were growing in the ventricular system of Truex’s brain.
    Kay did take issue with one thing in the report. Folkerth and Durso, citing Kay as their source, had written in the summary of their report that Max had died after a ‘several-hours interval of progressive lethargy and breathing difficulties’ – a description that would be very compatible with an impairment of brainstem function. ‘That is completely incorrect,’ said Kay. She reiterated that Max had not complained of tiredness until a few minutes before his death, and had not shown any breathing difficulties until the very last moments of his life. ‘I think they went back after the fact,’ she said, meaning that Folkerth and Durso misremembered what Kay had told them in a manner that fit in better with their pathological findings. To be fair to Folkerth and Durso, the main text of the report does not state that Truex had breathing difficulties for hours prior to his death, but only tiredness.
    I had thought that Kay might react to what she learned with considerable hostility toward Iacono, but she didn’t – not in the couple of hours I was with her, at least. On the contrary, she re-emphasised her belief that Iacono had acted out of good intentions and that Max himself had urged Iacono to go ahead with the procedure. ‘If this [report) is true, it’s very sad in a way,’ she commented, ‘because it means that what Max set out to do to help himself may have actually gone completely the other direction.’
    Iacono stopped doing foetal transplants in 1989, after he had operated on a total of 25 to 30 patients, all of them in China. ‘When you start adding up the negative aspects of foetal grafts,’ he told me, ‘including the risks of immunosuppression as well as infection from the foetus and contamination from these other things, the risks of foetal grafts are pretty high.’ In a paper published in 1994, Iacono argued that foetal transplantation was a less successful treatment for Parkinson’s disease than another neurosurgical procedure called pallidotomy, which involves destruction of part of a brain region called the pallidum. At the time I visited Iacono he was specialising in pallidotomy operations: he did them, as he put it, in ‘industrial numbers’.
    Some other centres, such as Curt Freed’s, continue to perform the transplants, with mixed results: about one-third of the patients have been greatly helped, some have seen little change in their condition, and a few have developed disabling side-effects of the procedure, such as involuntary flailing movements. In Freed’s hands, the transplanted cells do survive, and no patients have been afflicted by the teratoma-like growths that Max Truex experienced.
    In the waiting room of Iacono’s Redlands office, I noticed a life-size portrait of a surgeon operating, with a man standing next to him guiding his scalpel. Oddly, that man was wearing neither gown nor mask nor gloves. It took me a moment to figure out the reason: that man was Jesus. Iacono had become quite religious since the Truex days, and he no longer approved of abortion or of using aborted foetal tissue for science. ‘I went from “I don’t care what I’m doing here with a foetal graft” to becoming a right-to-lifer,’ he said. ‘I’d see these little guys, and after a while you realise you can tell how they’re going to grow up and what their personality’s going to be like; you can almost name them.’
    After my meeting with him in 2000, things did not go well for Iacono. In October 2001, California’s Loma Linda University Medical Center, where Iacono was doing his surgery, revoked his privileges, meaning that he could no longer operate there. According to the California Medical Board and