Michael J. Fox and The Michael J. Foundation Co-Founder Debi Brooks sat down with Fortune Editor-in-Chief Clifton Leaf to talk about how patients are driving both the urgency and the science behind finding a cure for Parkinson’s disease.

Michael said, “If I accept it, and I recognize it, and I look at it, and I’m honest with it, and I say, ‘This is what it is’…I can keep track of it,” Fox told Leaf. If “I don’t recognize it and I don’t accept it, it’s just this amorphous blob of goo that seeps into every cranny of my life and confuse things.”

“We’re the experts on what we have. You can meet 10,000 scientists and researchers, but unless they have Parkinson’s…they won’t know what it’s like to have Parkinson’s,” said Michael as he talked about the integral role patients play in setting the research agenda. “We have a responsibility as patients. They [researchers] need to be fully informed of our experience.”

Shake It Up together with our partners at The Michael J. Fox Foundation are the highest private funders of Australia Parkinson’s research across multiple institutes.

Learn more about the research that Shake It Up is co-funding with The Michael J. Fox Foundation and how you can get involved in upcoming clinical trials.