Here are some quibbles - it's not a "new" surgery. Benabid's first cases were published in 1987 and people have been steadily doing them since. FDA approval

Here are some quibbles - it's not a "new" surgery. Benabid's first cases were published in 1987 and people have been steadily doing them since. FDA approval was in '01 or so. I think the amount of patients who have received the device is now north of 100k. Medtronic's patent on subthalamic stimulation has now expired, and St. Jude and Boston Scientific are readying competitive devices (and better in many ways, IMHO) for their own device approval trials. (Boston Scientific's device traces its lineage to Al Mann and the cochlear implant, which is a fascinating story in its own right). It's not even a fancy device in its own right. For the EE folks out there it's just a wire hooked up into a device based off of Medtronic's cardiac pacemakers. It's a square wave that's generated by a capacitor discharge, with some simple bread board inside to allow programming of pulse duration, voltage amplitude, and frequency. That being said, the effects are indeed fascinating, and no one is sure exactly why it works. The best review papers that I can be gotten if you pubmed Cameron McIntyre, Svetlana Miocinovic, Jerry Vitek, or Phil Starr. There's also an interesting one looking at FFT-generated power spectra taken from measurements during surgery by Cora de Hemptinne which is pretty good. Mike Okun and Kelly Foote are pretty cool people, though, good to see them getting a shout out.