My Father, My Brother and Me

In 2004, Frontline correspondent 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 more than 1 million Americans, the causes of which remain largely unknown and the cure for which has proved frustratingly elusive.

In Frontline: My Father, My Brother and Me, Iverson sets off on a personal journey to understand the disease that has taken such a toll on his family. 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; and a geneticist who helped identify some of the gene mutations responsible for Parkinson’s and who is now working on drugs to fix them.

Iverson also has intimate conversations with fellow Parkinson’s sufferers 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 federal funding for promising stem cell research in 2001, three years before Iverson got his diagnosis.

Watch this encore presentation of Frontline: My Father, My Brother and Me Tuesday, June 12 at 10:00 p.m. on WCVE PBS/WHTJ PBS