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Scientists Restore Walking After Spinal Cord Injury
Spinal cord damage blocks the routes that the brain uses to send messages to the nerve cells that control walking. Until now, doctors believed that the only way for injured patients to walk again was to re-grow the long nerve highways that link the brain and base of the spinal cord. For the first time, a UCLA study shows that the central nervous system can reorganize itself and follow new pathways to restore the cellular communication required for movement. The lead researcher said, "This pessimistic view [that severe injury to the spinal cord means permanent paralysis] has changed over my lifetime, and our findings add to a growing body of research showing that the nervous system can reorganize after injury."
Please, don't bring this shit up. It's a debate that goes in circles and never finds a solution that's to anyone's satisfaction.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Killing us with hope? Great advances in medicine don't occur overnight. They are often long slogs taking decades infrequently punctuated by a breakthrough that may or may not lead to cures. HIV used to be regarded as a death sentence and just over twenty years ago many feared a pandemic. It is now, and has been for a few years, regarded by HIV clinicians as a long-term treatable disease. It still isn't cured and a cure is probably still quite far off, but people afflicted with it have hope for a normal life.
Don't underestimate the value of hope. While something as dramatic as Christopher Reeves getting up and walking didn't occur in reality, it is important that people know advances are being made. A cure may not be available in our lifetime but the hope for one encourages scientists to pursue the research, people to fund it and patients to hang in for the results.
Well, thanks to the Internet, I'm now bored with sex.
Your self-image, the precise volume that you occupy in space and how it's organized, is one of the most important aspects of your consciousness. It allows you to navigate past a table in the hallway and miss it by a fraction of a centimeter. It's also very dynamic; after all - people change when they grow. Damage to that area of the brain is debilitating; not just phantom-phenomena (pains), but there are people who cannot move a leg if they don't see it. Others imagine that the person in the mirror is someone else.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Why
Even though the issue is of personal importance to me, I won't be holding my breath until a good solution comes out.
Actually, the scientists did not "restore walking" in the mice. The scientists only studied the mice while the mices' bodies restored walking.
Wow. It's pretty sick for you to immediately jump from the concept of loving parenting to the concept of child abuse.
If only your mother had had the foresight to abort YOU.
News flash: that isn't your body or your "kid". You don't like it, write your congressman. If a majority of the people want abortion outlawed, it will be. Until then, you're out of luck. Why don't you ask your imaginary friend Jesus to help you.
Posting under my real login because 1) my karma can take it 2) I'm not a coward.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
The scientist didn't restore walking after spinal cord injury. The mice restored their own ability to walk by neural rerouting. The scientist just cut the nerves and waited to see what happened. If the scientists actually restored the ability to walk when it was otherwise unlikely to return on its own, then this would be a much bigger story. This story is just another interesting data point that the brain and nervous system are much more plastic than previously thought but we've known that for at least a decade.
Friend, the only magical thing that happens is that the fetus goes from being completely within the mother's body, with every single one of the fetus's biological processes regulated and supplied by the mother, to being outside the mother's body, breathing on it's own, an "individual", a "person" for the first time. As someone who watched his daughter being born, I can tell you it's a very important moment. Oh, it's wonderful to see that ultrasound, but is it a person? Nunh-uh.
In my view, the state of being completely within, enveloped by, the mother's body is very much a state of "belonging" to the mother. For that reason, I give the mother, the vessel, the owner of that fetus the right to decide its disposition. No one else.
So the answer to "when does a fetus become a person?" is: "When the mother says it does." As a father of a beloved child, 19 now, sleeping about 30 feet away from me, upstairs, right now, I can tell you just how insignificant the act of fatherhood is until the baby emerges from the mother's body. 20 seconds of frantic (though pleasurable) exertion, and then 9 months of bewilderment. I wouldn't have dared try to exert any dominion over that fetus. And, as someone who is pretty fond of women, especially since my mom, my wife, my sister and my daughter all happen to be women, I don't want the government, state or federal, or some self-proclaimed religious leader, to try to exert dominion over a woman's fetus, either. Do you get that? It's a woman's fetus.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"We are against abortion until the fetus grows up and murders someone, then the adult fetus should be aborted by hanging, firing squad, electrocution, or lethal injaction."
Support abortion of adults like all good pro-lifers
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Actually this is a distraction from the real argument.
What we should be asking isn't "when does life begin" but rather "can we force someone to be responsible for another's well being".
When people are brain dead we bury them in the ground or cremate them. We no longer treat them as we would any other person. Recognizing how we treat someone after they've stopped thinking, what's the practical difference in how we treat someone before they start thinking?
If the word "potential" is entering your mind, consider this. Thanks to modern science and cloning, every cell on your body is capable of turning into a complete human. Everytime you scratch an itch or jerk off in the shower you are committing a virtual holocaust.
Ignoring potential which is incomparable, from the perspective of the fetus, there is no practical difference between and abortion and contraception other than the discomfort to the mother.
Blastocysts have 150 cells, a fly's brain has over 100,000. There is no brain, there is nothing recognizable. If you think this spec of cells has a soul already then how do you explain when it splits and make twins? Is it 1 soul in 2 bodies, half a soul in each? Or is it obvious that this metaphysics of souls in a petri dish is kind of silly?
Anyone putting enough thought into it realizes there are no hard and fast rules on morality and the only thing that makes sense in today's world is to allow the person keeping the fetus alive to make the choice.
Finally, if one really puts thought into it, the actual supreme court case on abortion was not about morality but instead was about ethics. It wasn't about life issues, but instead was about privacy issues. That's why the abortion issue is still a hot topic. It pits a woman's right to privacy against the fetus' right to exist. Regardless of whether one believes that life begins at conception or not, at some point during the nine month gestation a fetus becomes viable to live outside the womb, but the court decision ruled that the woman's right to privacy rules until the fetus is totally out of the womb, no ifs ands or buts.
People will argue till the end of the world about whether life begins at conception and whether it is moral to abort an embryo. However, in the US anyway, abortion is legal through the ninth month. When you ask people to defend aborting a viable fetus, one where the "person keeping the fetus alive" is just a very temporary situation, then all of those emotional arguments fall away and we are left with the question of what's the real difference between a child born a month premature and one still in the womb? Both are viable. Both have to rely on someone else for all the necessities of life. The only real difference is location.
So in reality, what you are stating is that it's not the person keeping the child alive that should make the choice (because the mother of the newborn also does this), but instead the location of the child to determine whether the person keeping it alive should be allowed to make the choice or not.
Truck drivers regularly miss me by a fraction of a centimeter on public roads.
Very funny, but actually an extension of the same thing. The old cliche of "becoming one with the machine" as it pertains to driving is very apt. A good driver "knows" exactly what space the car occupies as it does become part of their personal space and they can parallel park instantly or do one of those "handbrake-slide-into-the-parking-space" tricks.
People who lack that perception are the ones endlessly backing into and out of a space when there's still a long way between them and the next car. Be interesting to see if there's been some test to see if these people also have a limited sense of personal space outside the car and are more prone to misjudging distances from their own bodies.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Let's hope not. See, ideally certain things should be defined as the rights of the individual involved, and not part of greater society's business. In this case, reproductive freedoms of the women.
I'd certainly like to think that a simple majority could never vote to re-enact slavery, or not allowing Jews or women to vote, or racially mixed marriages -- because, it's not simply a matter of the will of the majority. "We hold these rights to be inalienable" and all that jazz.
As much as people in the US would like to overturn Roe v Wade, one would hope that the judiciary would remember the points involved in the case. There are broader issues involved.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
To value merely being alive over the freedom to make choices is to make being alive worthless. I'd rather be dead than existing solely as a breeding machine for the state.