For the first time, scientists have demonstrated that primates, including humans, have an innate ability to repair some spinal damage, including recovering from paralysis. The next step is to enhance this ability, so that we can regrow injured spinal nerves.
It’s been known for a long time that people with moderate injuries to the nerves in their spinal cords can sometimes spontaneously recover – regaining the ability to move and walk over time. Now a group of researchers have published a paper inNature Neuroscience that suggests this may be a trait shared by all primates. Many spinal injuries are followed by fresh nerve growth in monkey spinal cords.
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Well I’ll be a…
Reminds me of Christopher Reeve.
this encouraging news is why i support the christopher & dana reeve foundation. too bad the scientist had to kill 14 monkeys to discover this, tho.
Great, but not too great for the monkeys. It is chilling reading thinking that an organism just as capable of experiencing pain as humans had to have its back broken (and killed) just for us to learn from the experiment.
I cannot imagine what sort of people work on these sorts of experiments.
even though a few monkeys broke their backs and probably died, it is great to know that we (and other primates) can heal minor injuries to our spinal cords. to the scientists: great job, but try to keep the monkey casualties to a minimum. not that you guys are heartless SOB’s but you know what they say
. A clean conscious is a working conscious.
I do still wonder how they are going to improve this ability we (primates) have.
Just because you like monkeys. I like cows. And chickens.
Sorry, that sounds a bit rude. I was just trying to be snappy
Well that’s given me some hope for Jackson.
[That wont make anysense unless you watch Emmerdale !]
i dont like monkeys, but i dont kill them.