Word: corded
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...SPAD: When I was doing Student Government one of the things that we always did was what we called Breakthroughs at football games. The football team would run through these sheets. It had these little cords that ran in front of it. One time these ropes had gotten crossed somehow. I was the one who was supposed to fix this. I was running back and forth in front of it and almost got killed by the football team. They had chosen the time that I was running in front of it to straighten out the cord...
...believes himself a direct recipient of such care. Fifteen years ago, as I was about to undergo five weeks of withering radiation for a 10-in.-long cancer inside my spinal cord, I found myself--an outlaw Christian who had, and has, no active tie with a church--transported, thoroughly awake, to another entirely credible time and place. I was lying on the shore of the Lake of Galilee with Jesus' disciples asleep around...
Much of what is behind the new hope is a better understanding of why the cord doesn't heal itself. In 1988 neuroscientist Martin Schwab of the University of Zurich isolated substances in the central nervous system whose sole purpose appears to be to block growth. In a healthy spine, the chemicals establish boundaries that regulate cell growth. After an injury, they do little but harm. In recent years, however, Schwab has developed antibodies that neutralize the growth blockers, allowing regeneration to occur...
Elsewhere, researchers are looking at ways to hasten the healing permitted by these antibodies. Peripheral nerves outside the cord heal themselves all the time, thanks to regenerative bodies called Schwann cells. Scientists at the Salk Institute in San Diego and at the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis at the University of Miami are experimenting with harvesting Schwann cells and transplanting them to the site of a spinal injury, where they can serve as a bridge across the wound...
...that damaged spines will become whole anytime soon. Treatments may be many years off, they caution, and only incrementally helpful--restoring wrist motion to a person who has none, for example. Most researchers, though, are more optimistic. Over the course of 10 years, they say, the riddles of the cord have been solved. The question now is not what the treatments for an injured spine should be, but how best to implement them. At hospitals such as the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the University of Florida, human trials are already getting under way. Studies at other hospitals are sure...