Reversing Paralysis

“ “Go, go!” was the thought racing through Grégoire Courtine’s mind.

The French neuroscientist was watching a macaque monkey as it hunched aggressively at one end of a treadmill. His team had used a blade to slice halfway through the animal’s spinal cord, paralyzing its right leg. Now Courtine wanted to prove he could get the monkey walking again. To do it, he and colleagues had installed a recording device beneath its skull, touching its motor cortex, and sutured a pad of flexible electrodes around the animal’s spinal cord, below the injury. A wireless connection joined the two electronic devices.

The result: a system that read the monkey’s intention to move and then transmitted it immediately in the form of bursts of electrical stimulation to its spine. Soon enough, the monkey’s right leg began to move. Extend and flex. Extend and flex. It hobbled forward. “The monkey was thinking, and then boom, it was walking,” recalls an exultant Courtine, a professor with Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.”- Antonio Regalado

Above mentioned is the story of how the scientists got the idea of reversing paralysis as said by Antonio Regalado, the senior editor for biomedicine at the MIT Technology Review. Thanks to the brain implant wired to the machine, over the past few years lab animals and a few people have managed to control the computer cursor or the robotic arms with their thoughts. Now, the researchers are moving towards connecting the brain reading technology wirelessly and directly to electrical stimulator on the body creating “neural bypass”, allowing people’s thoughts to move their limbs again.

At Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, a case team led by Robert Kirsch and Bolu Ajiboye, they slid more than 16 fine electrodes and 2 recording implants in a quadriplegic’s body, who cannot move anything but head and shoulder. This experiment allowed the man to raise his arm slowly with the help of spring-loaded arm set and willing his hand to open and close. He even raised a cup with a straw to his lips and he cannot do all this without the system.

The invention and success of this technology could save millions of lives and also cure the incurable diseases.

By
Aastha Sethia