Renowned German artist Joerg Immen-dorff is used to causing a stir. But when he flew to China this March to receive an unconventional treatment for his neurological disease, he provoked uproar at home. His doctor scolded him for trying a therapy that was unproven. And newspapers warned of the possible rise of medical tourism to China based on false hopes. Immendorff was undeterred. He suffers from ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive disease that is slowly breaking down his nerve cells and destroying his muscle control. The condition is incurable, and Immendorff was willing to try nearly anything to alleviate his symptoms. "I see myself as part of an experiment," he told the German newspapers. The artist's destination was the clinic of Hongyun Huang, a neurosurgeon at Chaoyang Hospital in Beijing. It was Huang who developed the treatment - and it was Huang who injected two million cells from an aborted fetus into Immendorff's brain.
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