Fighting Paralysis With Electricity 56
the_newsbeagle writes "In spinal cord injuries, the brain's commands can't reach the lower body — so in a ground-breaking experiment at the University of Louisville, researchers are providing artificial commands via electrodes implanted in the spine. The first paralyzed people to try out the tech have already been able to stand on their own, and have regained some bowel and sexual function. A video that accompanies the article also shows paralyzed rats that were able to walk again with this kind of electrical stimulation."
Re:Proud to see stuff like this... (Score:-1, Insightful)
Nothing I did helped make the world a better place. The work I did made a CEO richer and that was about it. The companies were built on "How can we cheapen this so we make more money on it."
- this comes from fundamental misunderstanding of what businesses that people use in their every day lives do. You are saying banking, insurance, credit card companies are not helping making a world a better place? So people shouldn't be able to pool risk, pool resources, be able to transact online or IRL with credit cards, being able to pay for things, invest in things that eventually can translate to other businesses existing (for example a niche business of attempting to fix a spinal cord injury that really will only benefit a tiny proportion of the population as opposed to something like a credit card company, a bank or an insurance provider, that allow orders of magnitude more people to do things they couldn't really do otherwise without those businesses)?
Tell you what, most people are not going to need a spinal cord surgery, but most people do need to be able to pay for their electrical and gas bill online so that their house doesn't go dark and cold in a winter night, guess what is more important and less selfish.