Word: spinal
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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...
...tissue. 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...
...typewriter. "He said, 'I know it works, but I don't know how or why or for how long,'" says Rein of Huang. "But at least it will give Willie a better quality of life for some time." For people robbed of movement, says Gary Allsop, a director of Spinal Cure Australia who's been in a wheelchair since an accident 16 years ago, even small gains can be miracles. "If someone told me they had got the use of their hands back, I would say, Sign...
...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...