Dr. Burt

I met Dr. Richard Burt and his smart head nurse again this week. We talked about my test results and the discomforts and dangers I can expect moving forward in the process of rebooting my immune system with chemotherapy and my own stem cells. When Dr. Burt asked me if I understood what I was in for, I told him I'd already been following his work for more than two years. He's treated more than 100 people without killing them. Yes, I know that's not a guarantee of safety. But I'd fired my neurologist and was moving ahead. To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, I already bought my ticket, now it's time to take the ride.

I am not a scientist, but brilliant scientists who change the world excite me. I realized this in the 1990s when I snagged a job as a graduate science writer at the University of Wisconsin. My job was to root out professors from their laboratories, write stories about their research, and popularize their work enough to attract research funding from wealthy non-scientists. The work was science journalism, but it was also PR. I was good enough at it to win a two-year paid fellowship, and then was honored with a trip to the National Press Club to meet Glenn T. Seaborg, winner of the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and a major contributor to the Manhattan Project. Seaborg died of old age a few years after I met him. By then I was hooked on science writing and on my way to interview more great scientists. My 25-year career, reporting on and promoting corporate research in the rapidly-growing fields of high-tech agriculture, has been a fascinating way to earn a living.

Now multiple sclerosis, and my drive to stop it, has hit life's pause button for me. Looking back, maybe it's not surprising how I responded when standard MS treatments failed me. I found and persuaded Dr. Richard Burt, one of world's most brilliant immunologists, to treat me with his innovative chemotherapy and adult stem cell protocol.

In 2011, Science Illustrated ranked Dr. Burt's stem cell work as one of the Top 10 Advances of the Decade. Burt was also selected for the Scientific American 50.

The odds of me recruiting someone of Dr. Burt's stature to stop my MS seem astronomical. Yet here I am after a long journey on a rocketship to the moon. Many have applied to his program and been rejected. I feel very fortunate. Though the process I'm about to go through is frightening, it helps to remind myself I've got the most competent medical team on the planet working on me.