Word: cords
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...while Dr. David Ho weighs the chances for an AIDS vaccine. Three of our staff members--Christine Gorman, Michael Lemonick and Jeffrey Kluger--tackle the revolution in smart medicine ("Will Robots Make House Calls?"), the crisis in nutrition ("Will We Keep Getting Fatter?") and the prospects for repairing spinal-cord injuries ("Will Christopher Reeve Walk Again?"). Readers will learn how some cancers will be cured, when we will be able to make smarter babies, and what will be on your dinner plate (hint: you won't need steak sauce...
Remarkably, there are other people--sober, scientific people--who agree. For centuries, doctors have considered the spinal cord an impossible thing to heal. Choked by proteins that block regeneration, denied other proteins that foster growth, dammed up by scar tissue at the site of an injury, a spinal cord that gets hurt tends to stay hurt. But for more than a decade, researchers have been learning to overcome these problems, figuring out ways to heal damaged cords and switch the power back on in spines long since gone dead. Even if Reeve and others don't walk by 2002, there...
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...