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'Bionic' Nerve To Repair Damaged Limbs and Organs
University of Manchester researchers have transformed fat tissue stem cells into nerve cells -- and now plan to develop an artificial nerve that will bring damaged limbs and organs back to life. In a study published in October's Experimental Neurology, Dr Paul Kingham and his team at the UK Centre for Tissue Regeneration (UKCTR) isolated the stem cells from the fat tissue of adult animals and differentiated them into nerve cells to be used for repair and regeneration of injured nerves. They are now about to start a trial extracting stem cells from fat tissue of volunteer adult patients, in order to compare in the laboratory human and animal stem cells.
Your spine would long give in if it is not muscled/solid enough to lift those hundreds of pound. Sure some people do lift as much , but they are trained for it, and as far as I know are not adverse to accident. Then also there is the center of gravity, unless you lift your 100's of pound like an those alter-lifting pros do, you could have serious problem when your gravity center is suddenly out of the body. Which naturally limit what you can take on, although the second one is probably a detail in comparison to the first one.
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Nerves are complicated. To splice a regrown nerve into a particular spot will require some mighty fine tools, and it's got to be the right type of neuron. Also, if an axon has been cut, the body will have reabsorbed it and there's nothing to splice. You'd have to thread your replacement axon from a ganglion next to the spine all the way out to the muscle or organ that is to be innervated.
Unfortunately this is probably beyond the abilities of current medical science. The problem is that the nervous system grows with the limbs and organs starting from early embryonic stage; it's not something that you can entice to regrow from scratch. Probably the long term solution will be nanomachines that are injected into the body and rebuild nerves along preplanned routes, molecule by molecule. This is very appealing and also probably about 50 years away from reality.
Also, axons (the long part of the nerve cell) usually require a myelin cell wrapping along its length to boost its ability to depolarize quickly. It's not clear that these folks in Manchester were able to grow a nerve cell along with its myelin. If we knew how to do that, we could also help people with multiple sclerosis, a disease that attacks myelin specifically.
As for ALS, it's an agent or group of agents that attacks motor neurons; these agents are not fully understood. It might be possible to splice in healthy neurons here and there but you still have the myelin problem.
This kind of research announcement should not be taken as a big step forward in fixing nerve damage until they can demonstrate it in vivo. Until then, it's just another cold fusion type story.
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More likely, because they wouldn't have to waste money and time learning how to trick the adult stem-cells into reverting into unspecialized stem-cells.
It doesn't take much effort to pump their study animals (be they sentient or not) full of immunosuppressant drugs, so the researchers can test the boundaries of science.
Everything they can now try with this *still limited* stem-cell, they could have been doing years ago with embryonic-stem-cells.
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I do some weightlifting and read up on this very topic some years ago (so take this info with a grain of salt). As far as i can remember the dorsal spine can take about 700kg and the ventral about 500kg. if you do squats or deadlifts it is very important to stress only the dorsal part of the spine, no hunching. here is a good link about squats: hhttp://www.exrx.net/Kinesiology/Squats.html , it's pretty hard to get the technique right.