Word: cordes
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Remarkable as Christopher Reeve's rehabilitation has been, doctors know that physical therapy can go only so far. To cure paralysis, they will have to find a way to repair or replace damaged spinal-cord nerves. Most of the research to date has been conducted on laboratory animals, but those experiments have set the stage for what scientists believe could be a burst of advances in human patients. "This is an exciting time in spinal-cord-injury research," says Dr. Wise Young, director of the Center for Collaborative Neuroscience at Rutgers University. "The progress in getting experimental therapies into clinical...
Like a strand of tightly woven twine, the spinal cord is actually made up of thousands of nerve fibers that are strongest and most effective when they work as an intact unit. Even the slightest fraying of the cord can interrupt or weaken signals traveling from the brain to the muscles, in some cases resulting in paralysis. To bridge these gaps in the tapestry of nerve cells, you have to either coax existing neurons to grow across the neural divide or introduce new cells to replace the damaged ones. Often the two strategies feed off each other: the growth...
...licensed a gene that would allow it to successfully stabilize human brain cells derived from fetuses and to proceed with treatments for different brain diseases. Eventually these could be used to combat Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, diabetes, chronic heart and kidney disease, liver failure, cancer and spinal-cord injury. Though stem cells can be obtained from adult tissue, scientists say they must also experiment with cells from fetuses and embryos if stem-cell research is to be translated into such specific therapies in humans. Anti-abortionists and some religious groups oppose any research on human embryos and fetuses...
...precisely what the advocates of research cloning are promising. Clone, grow it and then use the cloned tissue to create near identical replacement parts for the original animal and thus presumably put us on the road to curing such human scourges as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's, spinal-cord injuries and the like...
...cells alive, growing one generation after another while retaining their pluripotentiality (their ability to develop into all different kinds of cells). Then you have to take those stem cells and chemically tweak them in complex ways to make them grow into specialized tissue cells--say, neurons for a spinal-cord injury. Then you inject the neurons into the patient and get your cure...