Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Lorenzo's Oil

This movie inspired by an incredible real life story opened with a Swahili warrior song:

"Life has meaning only in the struggle.
Triumph or defeat is in the hands of the gods.

So let us celebrate the struggle."

The Odones family has a child, Lorenzo, who is struggling from an extremely rare form that rapidly degenerates the brain and ultimately reduces the victim to a mass of flesh before he dies. The disease is poorly funded and thus has an abysmally few number of people working on its therapies. When the parents of the child try to find a doctor who can advise on their son's pathetic state, they find all the doctors to be equally groping in the dark. The Odones take the challenge upon themselves in trying to understand the basic bio-chemistry behind the fat-enzyme metabolism of the heartless-disease. And they succeed in finding a right mix of diet (a combination of a certain variant of Olive Oil and a certain other variant of Canola Oil) that controls the production of a certain saturated fat that leads to the degeneration of brain. The boy's parents have to fight a whole scientific establishment as well, in order to try out their self-discovered, controversial approach to the disease (A good illustration of cons of objectivity.)

The efforts boy's parents put in fighting the disease is breath-taking as well as extremely inspirational.

Set at around 2hr16min, this real life story is surely going to inspire you with its wonderful layman analogies on some miraculous bio-chemistry discoveries made by Lorenzo's parents.

Makes me want to sing the Swahili song again and again....

3 comments:

yuwen said...

hello~!

im yuwen, im from singapore and i recently watched the movie, lorenzo's oil during my biology lecture in my university...
ha its truly inspirational and i cried like hell throughout the entire show.
its brilliant!
just want to tell you that it inspired me as much as it probably did to you.

fight on and enjoy life! =)

btw do u know where can u get the torrent to download the movie? a good active healthy torrent.. been searching for it.

take care, ta!

Edwin said...

hi. im from singapore too, and i watched it after my life science prof asked us to watch it.. truly inspiring!

however i find that some people try to solve the cons of scientific process by relying on a non-evidence based worldview and get into a lot of trouble

The recent measles outbreak in US is an elegant example of how pseudo-science and conspiracy theories about Big Pharma can get people killed.

Andréa Sá said...

I love this movie but I'm trying hard to find the Swahili's song name. Or at least, to find the quote on the begining of the movie in swalihi, in the original language. Could you help me out please? thank you! :)