Word: spinal
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Though available drugs are still crude, pioneer work in brain research may lead to some astonishing new ones. A crucial discovery came when researchers located what are known as the brain's opiate receptors. These are the specific sites in the brain and spinal cord where such drugs as opium and morphine act. These and other recent discoveries open up the possibility of aiming artificial drugs at specific receptors, and perhaps duplicating the body's natural internal "drugs" that help keep normal people normal. Says Solomon Snyder, a psychiatrist and pharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University: "As a result of psychopharmacology...
...brain. Snyder's lab located a high density of receptors in the medial thalamus, an area of the brain responsible for registering deep sustained pain; in the amygdala, a region of the brain's limbic system that plays a role in controlling emotion; and in the spinal cord...
...inextinguishably optimistic in the face of adversity, because of his biochemistry. The key to mankind's optimism, he argues, lies in those lately discovered substances called endorphins. These are the morphine-like chemical agents that the body itself produces, sending them into special sites of the brain and spinal cord to reduce pain. In this, says Tiger, "we may be on the way to finding a specific source for notions of personal wellbeing. Endorphins may not serve principally to reduce pain. Their major function may be to anesthetize the organism against responding too directly and forcefully to negative cognitive...
...based on the work of Soviet Physiologist Levon A. Matinyan, who claims to have regenerated severed spinal cords in rats. If he has, he is the first to have done it, and many American spinal experts are openly skeptical of Matinyan's report. Still, the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke was sufficiently intrigued to invite Matinyan and the Polenov's director, Veniamin U. Ugryumov, to the U.S. in 1976. American researchers are trying to duplicate the rat experiment, but Dr. Murray Goldstein, NlNCDS's deputy director, says that preliminary results are disappointing...
Goldstein, for his part, thinks that much of the improvement results not from any basic change in the spinal cord's condition, but from the Soviets' strenuous physiotherapy. Says he: "Braces and boots support the body's weight and keep it upright while the walker is pushed ahead. Then the arms support the body as the legs swing forward. It's not walking. And if the strength in the arms and upper body is not kept up through continued intense rehabilitation, then it's back to the wheelchair." Sadly, he adds, for most paraplegics...