Word: cordes
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...perhaps the highest, worries linger about the lack of federal backing and the possibility that Congress could someday trump state law with nationwide restrictions. That discourages some young scientists who are deciding whether to specialize in stem-cell work. "Students are scared to commit," says Hans Keirstead, a spinal-cord researcher at the University of California at Irvine. "They don't know if the laws are going to change, and I can't fully dispel those fears...
...Patients like Willie face a terrible fate. Relentless and always fatal, MND kills motor neurones, the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that activate muscles. As muscles stop working, sufferers lose the ability to speak, walk and even cough, but their minds remain alert, horribly aware of the spreading paralysis. No one knows what causes the disease, and most patients die when their breathing fails. By late last year, with Willie unable to speak and finding it so hard to swallow she could barely eat, the couple were willing to try anything...
...Performing the 50-min. operation was neurosurgeon Huang Hongyun, who believes the cells he uses - often wrongly described as stem cells but actually olfactory ensheathing glial cells (oegs) taken from the noses of aborted second-trimester fetuses - can help restore some of the functions stolen by MND and spinal-cord damage. That same day, surrounded by her ecstatic family, Willie swallowed properly for the first time in months...
...Several hundred other people with MND and damaged spinal cords have, like Willie - the first person from Australia or New Zealand known to have been treated by Huang - paid around $20,000 to undergo the procedure, while hundreds more are on Huang's waiting list. They're undeterred by controversy not just over the cost of the surgery and the source of the cells (the Terpstras say at least something good is coming from the terminations) but over the science underpinning the treatment. There's some evidence in animal studies that oegs, which are key helper cells in the nose...
...then we should be able to put it to bed." Huang wasn't available to speak to Time, but told the magazine's Asia edition last year that his operation was "safe, doable and effective." The world's first clinical trial of patient-derived oegs on human spinal-cord injuries, whose first results are due to be published this year, is led by Professor Alan Mackay-Sim, of Queensland's Griffith University. He says too many questions about Huang's procedure - even questions as basic as exactly what cells are used - remain. "These are extremely vulnerable people...