In 2002, Dave Iverson received the same news that had been delivered to his father and older brother years earlier: he had Parkinson*s disease, a degenerative neurological disorder that affects millions around the world. In My Father, Brother, and Me, Iverson sets off on a personal journey to understand the disease that scientists believe could hold important clues to solving a number of major neurological conditions like Alzheimer*s, multiple sclerosis, and ALS. Along the way, he meets some remarkable people a leading Parkinson*s researcher whose encounter with frozen heroin addicts led to a major breakthrough, a Parkinson*s sufferer given a new lease on life by an experimental brain surgery, a geneticist whose identified some of the faulty genes responsible for Parkinson*s and is now working on drugs to fix them. Iverson also has intimate conversations with fellow Parkinson*s sufferers like actor Michael J. Fox and writer Michael Kinsley, who describe how they became caught up in the politics of Parkinson*s research after the Bush administration greatly restricted promising stem cell research in 2001, just before Iverson got his diagnosis. When you*re talking about the potential to heal and cure, and it*s not going forward because of its value as a political wedge issue, Fox said of his reaction to the Bush stem cell restrictions. As Michael Kinsley tells Iverson: Six years have gone by [since the stem cell restrictions were imposed] and those are pretty important years for people like me. Toward the end of this film, Iverson finds a new source of hope in a very unlikely place: new research which indicates that regular exercise can help delay or prevent the disease.

Running Time: 58 mins

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