A New Look at Disease: Parkinson's as Seen Through the Eyes of an Engineer [Book review]

This book presents a look at the intersection between control principles in engineering and life sciecnes. It lies at this intersection but is quite different, both in content and style, from these other books. The rather short book is written in a way that is easily accessible to a reader from any background. The style is direct, with some parts of the book very personal, for example, when the author relates his own experiences both in control engineering and with Parkinson´s. As with other neurodegenerative diseases, the number of patients is expected to grow significantly. While Parkinson´s is an area of intensive research, the disease is poorly understand, especially its early preclinical phase. The main reasons for this lack of understanding are that there are a multitude of possible causes-such as head injury, pesticide exposure, and genetic predisposition´ and the disease spreads very slowly, usually over one or more decades. The book consists of four parts. The first part provides a historical perspective underpinning the point that scientific research did not always evolve smoothly, but from time to time new approaches were taken. This perspective is not only discussed but is also nicely illustrated by photographs and reprints from old books. The first part ends by predicting that the time for a change in pharmaceutical research is close. The second part gives an introduction to control engineering principles such as feedback, modeling, and stability. The third part introduces Parkinson´s disease in a very understandable manner, even for nonspecialists. The book discusses the main hypotheses of possible causes of the disease and its propagation as well as the complexity caused by the high variability of disease cases. At this point, the reader may wonder if there is any hope to understanding Parkinson´s.