Oliver Sacks: When the patients started declining, I felt bewildered, anxious, sometimes guilty. I didn’t know what was happening. I tried all sorts of ways of restoring or retrieving the original response, and at the same time, I think, of perhaps preparing patients for what might be some continuing — but now only partial and less dramatic — response. I think finally it was probably accepted by all of us that some sort of decline was perhaps a physiological necessity, maybe associated with the amount of damage there had been to the nervous system and the fact that one was perhaps trying to stimulate the one or two percent of cells which remained in certain systems to do the whole job. Contrary to the movie, which, in a way, shows everything as ending in ’69, many of the patients made accommodations, and some of them lived 15 or 20 years afterwards, at least with sort of a partial animation. But it was a — you know, as the person who gave the L-DOPA, I tended to be invested by them almost with too much hope and power, and then they got angry with me or whatever. One of the patients said that L-DOPA had become “Hell-dopa.” A very, very complex business. Morally complex, medically complex.