Word: spinal
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...When I was 22 and a first-year medical student, I suffered a spinal-cord injury. I have not walked in 32 years. I would be delighted to do so again. But not at any price. I think it is more important to bequeath to my son a world that retains a moral compass, a world that when unleashing the most powerful human discovery since Alamogordo - something as protean, elemental, powerful and potentially dangerous as the manipulation and re-formation of the human embryo - recognizes that lines must be drawn and fences erected...
...surplus furniture in the crowded hallways and push patients around on jerry-rigged gurneys made with bicycle wheels. Yet Nan Davis has traveled halfway around the globe to undergo a new procedure available only here. Six hours ago, Dr. Huang Hongyun injected 1.5 million fetal cells into her damaged spinal cord. Davis, a teacher from Ohio, hasn't walked since 1978 after a car crash left her paralyzed from the bottom of her rib cage down. Shortly after she awakens, Davis signals with a thumb and index finger that she can feel nearly two inches lower than before. "My goal...
...Huang's novel procedure involves injecting cells from a fetal olfactory bulb, the part of the brain where nose cells terminate, into the damaged area of the spinal cord. Huang says the transplanted olfactory cells help repair damaged nerve cells in the spine. Although he hasn't yet published his findings, the results so far seem compelling. "I'm pretty convinced of definite sensory improvement and modest motor improvement" in Huang's patients, says Dr. Wise Young, a prominent expert in spinal injuries and chairman of cell biology and neuroscience at Rutgers University (where Huang studied under Young...
...other researchers so that they can ascertain just what he's injecting. "Something very interesting may be happening here, but what's needed is independent validation," says Dr. James Guest of the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis at the University of Miami, the world's premier research center on spinal injuries...
...brain to differentiate between various smells. They transport these signals with the help of olfactory ensheathing glia (OEG) cells. Because axons extend from all nerve cells, scientists have long wondered what would happen if OEG cells were taken from the olfactory bulb and introduced somewhere else?say, in the spinal cord of someone like Nan Davis...