“I understand that smoking is bad,” said Maryka Quik, director of the Neurodegenerative Diseases Program at SRI International,
a nonprofit research institute based in California’s Silicon Valley. “My father died of lung cancer. I totally get it.”
“The whole problem with nicotine is that it happens to be found in cigarettes,” she told me.
“People can’t disassociate the two in their mind, nicotine and smoking. It’s not the general public that annoys me,
it’s the scientists. When I tell them about the studies, they should say, ‘Wow.’ But they say, ‘Oh well, that might be true,
but I don’t see the point.’ It’s not even ignorance. It’s their preconceived ideas and inflexibility.”
I met Quik at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience held in Washington, D.C. Amid thousands of studies presented
in a cavernous exhibition hall, the title of hers jumped out: “Nicotine Reduces L-dopa-Induced Dyskinesias by Acting at 2 Nicotinic Receptors.”
“A huge literature says that smoking protects against Parkinson’s,”she said. “It started as a chance observation, which is frequently the most interesting kind.”
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