The Works
Two novels and a research career's worth of papers. Different rooms in the same house — both about what the mind does under pressure.
Nigel Carpenter, a researcher at MIT, is on the verge of something extraordinary: enhancing the cognitive abilities of ravens using human genetic material. His work could rewrite neuroscience and ornithology alike — if he can face what it means to play God, and what begins to emerge in his subjects.
A thought-provoking blend of genetic modification, human–animal communication, and the unpredictable consequences of ambition without limits.
In 1959, college student Matt receives a letter from his cousin, a soldier presumed dead in the Korean War. The invitation leads Matt and two friends to his family's isolated lodge in northern Minnesota, where they walk into a nightmare. By morning, everyone is gone but Matt. Accused of murder and never cleared, he spends decades trapped in a small town, haunted by what he saw. Years later, when the lodge's new owners uncover Matt's story, they follow the trail of the vanished cousin into Alaska's Brooks Range and discover a vast subterranean city that was never meant to be found.
Work in movement disorders and Parkinson's disease, much of it out of the Parkinson's Institute in Sunnyvale, California.
Ballard PA, Tetrud JW, Langston JW · Neurology · 35(7):949–956
The clinical description of the MPTP cases that gave Parkinson's research its first reliable model of the disease.
Read the abstract →Tetrud JW, Langston JW · Science · 245:519–522
First evidence that selegiline delays the need for levodopa in early Parkinson's disease.
Read the abstract →Kurth MC, Tetrud JW, Irwin I, Lyness WH, Langston JW · Neurology · 43:1036–1039
A practical approach to smoothing out the daily swings that make advanced Parkinson's so hard to live with.
Read the abstract →Burkhard PR, Langston JW, Tetrud JW · Neurophysiologie Clinique · 32:119–126
How to tell a genuine tremor from a performed one — a question that matters in both clinic and courtroom.
Read the abstract →Nonnekes J, Post B, Tetrud JW, Langston JW, Bloem BR · The Lancet Neurology · 17(4):300–301
A look back at the original patients more than thirty years on.
Read the abstract →