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Living-Donor Nerve Transplant
Over at CNN there is an AP report which might remind you alternately of stories by William Gibson and Mary Shelley: Doctors in Texas have just transplanted nerves from a living donor (in this case the mother of the recipient, an 8-month old baby) to replace ones damaged at birth. The operation itself was successful, but whether the nerve will successfully carry signals between the infant's arms and brain won't be known for a while. Seems like we can now transplant just about everything short of the brain in one form or other -- skin, bone marrow, major organs.
I'm surprised that people haven't suggested that there has been a number of living-donor brain transplants, going on in secret. You've met the donors, of course. They can't be allowed out in public, but in order to give them some human contact, they let the donors post to Slashdot.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Yeah, there's a pretty common misconception that nerves can't repair themselves. There's also another misconception that a human brain can't/doesn't repair/grow after a certain age.
Both are wrong. Brain development slows to an absolute crawl, comparitively speaking, after youth. But it still grows and changes.
Now, nerve cells in the rest of the body generally don't repair themselves, but that's not a hard and fast rule. For instance, pain receptors are hooked up by nerve cells, and when you loose a chunk of skin(including muscule beneath it), you can still feel pain afterwards.
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Seems like we can now transplant just about everything short of the brain
Would you call it "brain transplant" or "body transplant"?
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
[the mother]...will have permamnent but slight numbness on the sides of her feet...
not only will his mom hit him with the whole "pain of birth" argument when his room is messy, she'll light her feet on fire to drive home the point of what an ungrateful little bastard he is.....
london is drowning and i live by river
I know the saying "Kids having kids" but an 8 month old mother is just wrong!
Geoff
That was an interesting story. When I had my cranial surgery (due to my locked jaw -- had to open my jaw -- it was so bad that I couldn't stick my tongue out), the doctors had to break some nerves to fix this (from my neck and right side of my head near the ear area).
After the complex surgery, the right side of my face were irressponsive (i.e. couldn't move and feel). That included my right eye where I couldn't move my eye lids (not even close fully).
After about two months, I went to another surgery to fix these damaged facial nerves. The doctors fixed this by connecting working nerves to the damaged ones. Basically, they were rerouting these signals as if you were rerouting a network.
Some of my broken nerves are currently recovered, but it will take years to recovered almost fully (not 100%).
You can read more details from here.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The mother's nerves do not carry any of the electro-chemical signals that the infant could use to move or feel its arm.
______________
"Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?" --prosecuting lawyer, for the British government, arguing against permitting publication of D. H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterly's Lover" (1960)
That's gonna make it hard for the mother to say, "You're getting on my nerves"...if her kid's got 'em...
How Jaded Are You?