Word: cures
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...developed scar tissue at the site of the break and whose distal spinal cord (the part below the injury) often turns to mush as the old neurons die--will be the last people to be helped by this research, if they'll be helped at all. The "cure" will probably end up like the polio vaccine: preventing paralysis, not abolishing...
Third, even in the unlikely event there is a cure for those presently paralyzed, it will at best be partial. The idea so dramatized in the Super Bowl commercial--that someone with a completely severed cord will actually walk--is very farfetched. Walking is a hugely complex motor and feedback activity. Look at how long it takes babies, who have totally intact nervous systems, to learn it. Look at how, despite decades of research to develop robots that walk, they remain primitive, often comical. Perhaps the long-injured will enjoy some partial return, some movement in the hands or chest...
When I was injured, I had a roommate in my four-bed ward who was making no effort to continue his education or plan for a new career. One day he told me why: "I'm going to wait seven years for a cure. Then I'm going to kill myself...
...false optimism Reeve is peddling is not just psychologically harmful, cruelly raising hopes. The harm is practical too. The newly paralyzed young might end up emulating Reeve, spending hours on end preparing their bodies to be ready to walk the day the miracle cure comes, much like the millenarians who abandon their homes and sell their worldly goods to await the Rapture on a mountaintop. These kids should instead be spending those hours reading, studying and preparing themselves for the opportunities in the new world that high technology has for the first time in history made possible for the disabled...
AIDS research is filled with Holy Grails--developing a vaccine, creating drugs that can cure the disease and, for both historical as well as treatment reasons, finding out how and when the virus emerged in the first place. The earliest sample of HIV-infected human blood dates back to 1959, but before that, the HIV family tree is bare...