Scientists Restore Walking After Spinal Cord Injury 181
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."
Good news for paraplegic mice! (Score:5, Funny)
Bad old saying (Score:2)
Nietzsche is Pietzsche.
-mcgrew
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yes, until now walking and swimming is making their ears very tired
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They're not actually paralized back in their own dimension [bbc.co.uk] and are just acting like this to study us...
Keep on forking in the real world (Score:3, Funny)
It's one more kid that'll never go to school
That'll never fall in love never get to be coooo-oool.
Re:Good news for paraplegic mice! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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It is reasonable to believe a similar law would be thrown out on the federal level, but do we want the federal government outlawing the practice?
Regardless of your position on the issue, should the
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However, being practical, the situation is what it is right now, and the Feds currently have asserted that they have authority here. A federal case should be evaluated on a federal level, so write your congressman or sue if you don't like
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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.
Meanwhile, back in 1865, in Atlanta: "That isn't your slave. You don't like it, write your congressman. If a majority of the people want slavery outlawed, it will be. Until then, you're out of luck. Why don't you ask your friend Lincoln to help you."
By the way, the ethics of abortion have nothing to do with religion, d
Re:Good news for paraplegic mice! (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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The only thing I have to thank religion for (specificially Catholicism) is that it brainwashed my 16yr old birth mother and her parents in the 70's. I'm sure that is the only reason I'm alive today for which I am extremely grateful. I pretty much won the lottery there and when I got my adoptive parents.
Myself, I'm pro-choice but detest this particular practice - It could have happend to me! Of course there wou
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Day 2: Oh wow that was intense! Oh I do love my sperm cell, he was just AWESOME!
Day 3: Oh look I have a twin sister. No, wait, three sisters. No, seven... thirteen... what's this? They're part of me!
Day 4: Mommie look I'm a mass of cells about the size of the hangnail. I'm not even a fetus and won't be for quite some time, let alone a baby.
Day 5: Oh look, mommie, the parent post is a troll! [kuro5hin.org]
Day 6: M
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Well, it's good to see a happy ending. She has a new friend to play with and is learning new things.
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Day 7
Satan has me now, I'm burning in a lake of sulphur with him, the vengeful God is torturing me for all eternity along with all the other unbaptised children.
One more soul subjected to unending torture by a God who claims to be loving.
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"Pro-life" platform: (Score:2, Insightful)
Support abortion of adults like all good pro-lifers
-mcgrew
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Re:"Pro-life" platform: (Score:4, Insightful)
A vote for a candidate who will pass laws for the corporations and against you is worse than a wasted vote. As I like to smoke put and bang hookers [slashdot.org] a vote for a Democrat or Republican is a vote for my own incarceration. As someone's sig says, "oh look, my tax dollars at work coming to arrest me!"
Who is moderating today? (Score:2)
So, I ask again, who is moderating these things today?
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As to the death penalty, since the government of my country is killing in my name then I do have a stake in that.
Jesus said to treat others like I would want to be treated. Well, I wouldn't want you meddling in my personal business that you have no stake in, so I'll not meddle in someone else's abortion decisions. If anyone asked me my opinion of should they have an abortion
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In my view, the state of bei
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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, conside
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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.
Not to pick nits, but what you are depositing in the shower is not capable of turning into a complete human being as it only has half the chromosomes needed to do so.
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?
If you are using the concept of a soul for your argument, you should be careful as it disproves your point. Religions that hold to the concept of a soul hold that twins both have an individual soul - the second one being infused when the cells separate to form the twin. Geography wouldn't make a difference as to that infusion - whether the
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but what you are depositing in the shower is not capable of turning into a complete human being as it only has half the chromosomes needed to do so
I said with modern science and cloning, not growing out of the grout in your shower. It's very much possible.
Maybe the 150 cell blastocyst doesn't have a brain
Which is all they need for embryonic stem cell research, which was the original topic, which proves my point.
Abortion, which I also brought up, is a different matter, however, in that it can occur after the fetus has developed.
In such a case, yes it is killing a limited intelligence but like I said, the issue is "can we force someone to care for another person" even against their will?
If so, any do
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I said with modern science and cloning, not growing out of the grout in your shower. It's very much possible.
Actually you referred to "jacking-off" in the shower creating a holocaust. I didn't see a connection between that and modern science and/or cloning.
n such a case, yes it is killing a limited intelligence but like I said, the issue is "can we force someone to care for another person" even against their will?
The answer is "no," but we can punish those who do not. If parents endanger the lives of their children, they (the parents) go to prison. Likewise, the courts can remove the children from the parents and place elsewhere to protect the children. So on one level you are correct, we cannot force someone to care for another person. Likewise, we cannot force s
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I didn't see a connection between that and modern science and/or cloning.
Then you aren't well read on those topics. Forget it then.
we cannot force someone to care for another person. Likewise, we cannot force someone to not drive their vehicle through a crowd of people.
You're off course Scotty, way off course.
When I said "cannot" I didn't mean physically, I meant ethically and when I said "care" I meant feed, clothe, shelter etc.
Ethically I can't force someone to care for another person, because that would be wrong.
Physically I can force them. A gun would do the job nicely.
The crowd full of people analogy doesn't even make sense in comparison.
You keep bringing up a deity in this discussion, assuming I am arguing from that point of view.
I assume nothing, those final comments are not particularly directed a
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When "the location" you are talking about happens to be inside the woman's body, that's one very important distinction.
Can we agree that something that is inside your body is under your dominion? Do we even have that much of a righ
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No, we can't. Try walking through customs with drugs stuffed in various body cavities and see what happens.
Also, the body has mucuous membranes on surfaces it considers hostile outside territory (e.g. the inside of the mouth, the gastrointestinal tract, or the inside of the uterus).
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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.
And it's totally self sufficient then? NOT.
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.
I simply cannot understand that. I saw the ultrasounds of my two boys... I saw the first one kick the ultrasound technician. His behaviour in the womb was in the same personality he has now. He most certainly WAS a person.
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.
In my view, the state of being completely within, enveloped by, the mother's body is very much a state of "belonging" to the child. For that reason, I give the baby, the precious contents, the owner of that womb the right to decide its d
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20 seconds of frantic (though pleasurable) exertion,
You're doint it wrong!
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So the answer to "when does a fetus become a person?" is: "When the mother says it does."
Even if she says it's after the 40th trimester?
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They do? Why?
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They have a natural right to temporary ownership of the woman's body. [...] They do? Why?
Because that's how the whole system works, since the beginning of humans. The first nine months of life use a host body.
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There is no such thing as a natural/biological right to anything. The whole concept of a right is a human thing. The only reason anyone has any rights at all is because they can defend them or rely on other people to defend them.
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There is no such thing as a natural/biological right to anything. The whole concept of a right is a human thing. The only reason anyone has any rights at all is because they can defend them or rely on other people to defend them.
You're stating a truism. I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. The right to mother's host body is a natural right in the context of human rights.
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A natural right in the context of human rights? I don't know what that means.
See here: Natural Rights [wikipedia.org]. And you keep harping on the fact that rights aren't laws of physics. As I said, that's a truism [wikipedia.org]. You seem to think this point is some subtle, powerful concept that no one else understands. Everyone understands that. It's irrelevent to the discussion at hand, which is deciding what is a natural right and what isn't.
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Then why is abortion legal?
For the same reason Slavery was legal 150 years ago.
Human rights are defined by humans. That's me and I say abortion stays.
Human rights are defined by humans. That's me and I say slavery stays. I pick you, and I'll use my gun and whip to back it up. I'm sure that since you are such a believer in individual rights, you won't mind if the government and police side with me and my right to keep you as a slave.
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Key words there being is seen as - as seen by US. Obviously "seen as" is subjective and varies over time and among societies.
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So you wouldn't of had a problem with your wife deciding to abort the day before the birth because she changed her mind? After all, it's "her fetus"
Typical appeal to emotion. Yet you ignore the fact that any bitch that evil and crazy, I wouldn't want to be shackled to the rest of my life. Better to find our your wife is a psycho hose beast before the life altering event not after. Are you asking if there will be a sense of loss or regret, sure, of course but I'd still be thanking FSM that the crazy bitch didn't spread her crazy genes all over the place and ruin my life. I love these ethical thought experiments, do some more!
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Yet you ignore the fact that any bitch that evil and crazy, I wouldn't want to be shackled to the rest of my life.
Yeah, better a child should die, than you be inconvenienced. [rolls eyes] Who cares what you want or don't want, compared to a human life? If you don't want the responsibility, then don't have kids.
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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.
There's no such thing as infinite freedom. Individual freedom is always a balance among the right to freedom for everyone. In other words, your freedom can't take priority over another's freedom -- the rights need to be balanced. And society must defend the rights of those who can't defend them themselves. That's why we have child supp
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Anecdote (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was 15, I had an accident (put my hand through a glass door, the glass cut through my wrist clean to the bone taking out all the tendons as well as the median nerve, that runs roughly up the middle of the front of the wrist and supplies the thumb, finger 2 and half of finger 3 and part of the palm with sensation).
To repair all the damage, it took 6.5 hours of microsurgery. The nerve took several months to fully regrow.
When it did, the sensation came out in all the wrong places - if I touched part of one finger, the sensation would come out somewhere else, for instance on another finger or somewhere more or less random in the affected area of the hand. But within a few months, the brain had "rerouted" everything, and the sensations gradually started coming out in the right place.
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Re:Anecdote (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Anecdote (Score:4, Funny)
Yikes (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. It's pretty sick for you to immediately jump from the concept of loving parenting to the concept of child abuse.
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Actually he is not far off base but most of the time it's not the feds, it's the local 5'o that overreacts. There was a case where a local family took some pictures of dad playing with his 3 and 5 year old daughters. He was tickling them doing that blowing on the belly thing.
The pictures where processed and since the pictures contained nude children the local police were called. That afternoon the children were taken by child custody and the parents were arrested for child molestation and production
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Excatally. And there is a very good chance that the only reason it was able to do that is because you where 15. I don't know how old you are today but I doubt that at my age I would be able to do that.
Right-side-up vision is learned, not hardwired (Score:5, Interesting)
After a while, everything began to appear right-side-up to him when he wore the glasses, so much so that he was able to ride a motorcycle while wearing them!
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I don't think it would pay to see how many of those cycles you can go through before you develop appreciable lag, I think that such 'reroutings' work by additions only, never by deletions.
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Actually, the lens in your eye projects an upside-down image on the retina. So, the special glasses actually made the image appear "right side up" on the retina.
Re:Right-side-up vision is learned, not hardwired (Score:4, Interesting)
At the time, is was a graduate student, working with University of Toronto's Steve Mann. (one of the world's 1st cyborgs) His setup consisted of LCD goggles, and video cameras attached to his head.
After 2 weeks of living life upside down, he said it became 'normal'. your brain flips it right-side up automatically.
he experimented with many other angles, giving each angle 2 weeks.
He found that it was very easy to adjust to 90 degree angles. (1 week or less) 45 degree angles took longer to get used to, but his brain would eventually get it, but anything else, like 33 degrees, just made him feel very sick.
That was 6-7 years ago.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Once or twice I
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Re:Right-side-up vision is learned, not hardwired (Score:4, Informative)
Your brain compensates for flaws in your vision more than people think. People would be suprised how shitty their eyes really are and how much the brain makes up for it. I saw a show on the discovery channel. It illistrated how your vision, esp. behind your optic nerve, has holes in it. They demonstrated how much your brain just fills in that part by what it thinks should go there.
it was pretty amazing, and pretty scary. i had to drive the next day.
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Re:Anecdote (Score:5, Interesting)
What I could never understand is why doctors never try similar techniques on spinal injuries. If you perform this type of surgery within the first couple of hours after the accident it should have the same chance of success as reconnecting a finger or even a limb. IIRC An axon in the hand is no different from an axon in the spinal column. If you can reconnect them in the limb what exactly prevents from reconnecting them in the spinal column (besides the complexity of opening it)?
Similarly, what exactly prevents from taking a chunk of nerve from somewhere, reconnecting the ends via microsurgery and implanting it bang in the middle of the broken part of the spinal column again via microsurgery?
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Re:Anecdote (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Anecdote (Score:4, Informative)
Spinal cord injuries may be repaired (even self heal) when you're harmed in the higher part of the spinal cord, near the brain. Counterintuitively, when it's cut near the bottom, it's nearly always definitive. Why ? Because the irrigation system is way more fragile in the lower part, and that's often where the problem is. When part of the spinal cord doesn't receive blood anymore, necrosis happens fast and then you can't do anything anymore.
Re:Anecdote (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's nothing. Truck drivers regularly miss me by a fraction of a centimeter on public roads.
Re:Anecdote (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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It wasn't a joke, and it's not very funny.
That's me, and yes, I do. Especially if I'm listening to musi
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This reminds me of the experiment they did where they had people wear goggles that made the world look upside-down. Subjects wore the goggles for several days, and eventually the brain "righted" itself. The subjects then saw through the goggles the right-side-up world.
And then guess what happened when they took the goggles off?
The brain is truly an amazing organ.
Re:Anecdote (Score:5, Informative)
Here's something slightly more specific, with some references.
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1997-03/858984531.Ns.r.html [madsci.org]
Re:Anecdote (Score:4, Interesting)
It's sounds like a related phenomenon.
In the late '80s I did a lot of gridding with Wild T1A theodolites, which reverse the image both laterally and vertically. We'd spend about 10 hours a day looking through the jigger with brief breaks in between.
For the first day or two, I had to make a conscious mental correction for the reversal and made a lot of transformation mistakes, but on the second day got to the stage where the view through the scope looked upright and moved on its correct axis. The transition between normal and reversed viewing was still hard hard, to the extent that I refused to drive a vehicle after a day's work. In about a week though, transitioning between worlds became effortless.
That was fine until I took a break for two weeks. When I got back, the disorientation happened again and the adaptation cycle restarted. Makes me wonder how stressful it is to the brain to rewire like that. There must be a reason it reverts if the ability isn't used.
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I learned to scuba dive with quadriplegics (Score:5, Interesting)
Two of us fully-abled people would buddy with the disabled divers. We'd pull them around the ocean floor.
I found it quite an eye-opening experience.
One of the students was my quadriplegic friend Foster Anderson [paralinks.net], who was injured in a motorcycle accident as a teenager. I haven't seen him for a while, but he used to commute from Santa Cruz to Silicon Valley in a special van to work as an engineer. He can just control his arms, but not his fingers.
I understand he once appeared on the cover of a surfing magazine, riding a surfboard.
I also read in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience that a study of Italian paraplegics found the unanimous opinion that becoming disabled was the best thing that ever happened to them: before their injuries, they failed to fully appreciate their lives. Afterwards they were able to live far more rich and rewarding lives, because they understood better just how precious the gift of life is.
Don't write off the disabled. They - we, rather, as I myself have a profoundly serious mental illness [geometricvisions.com] - are capable of far more than most of society gives us credit for.
Think of that next time you park illegally in a handicapped spot. (Foster saw someone do that at a restaurant once, and started repeatedly ramming the car with his electric wheelchair!)
Misleading title: not actually done yet (Score:2)
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Then some large corporation offered him $$$ aplenty for the technology, and offered him a very nice post too. I've not heard a thing about his technology since.
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Misleading comment, did not read article properly (Score:2)
For many, this could be a dream come true (Score:2)
I always found a bit distressing those gadgets for electrically inducing movements of limbs. The calbes hanging out and connecting the limbs with the processor, I dunno, just terrible. But for one who has his/her legs paralyzed, I guess even that is acceptable.
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Why ... such studies have been underway for quite a while. In fact, "repairing" spinal cord damage is one of the holy grails of science, that's unfortunately always at least two decades away. It's a bit like controlled, energy-positive nuclear fusion.
Even though the issue is of personal importance to me, I won't be holding my breath until a good solution comes out.
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As a cyborg myself [slashdot.org] I think I would prefer cables to a wheelchair and attendant.
But yes, corrective nerve surgery would be even better.
-mcgrew [slashdot.org]
Oh, I get it! (Score:3, Funny)
Learning to walk again (Score:5, Interesting)
Misleading title (Score:2, Insightful)
Get to the human testing already! (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, I know there's risks involved in rushing into human testing in medicine, before a complete study on other animals has been completed. But, you know... some things are worth taking the extra risk for!
So how about offering up guinea pig slots for those of us with not much else left to lose?
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I can sort understand what you are talking about here. I dated a girl who was a diabetic. She would get depressed because she would read about all these amazing cures that where supposed to be almost here but would never come. You know, we where supposed to have cured diabties 20 years ago.
I doubt there is any real to the conspericty theory about them keeping the cures for diabities in some hole some where, or cancer. But there is enough curcumstatual evidence out there to make you wonder.
Yet Another Misleading Headline (Score:4, Insightful)
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Click the sig to see what I mean; I have a device replacing my eye's lens. I was extremely nearsighted all my life, then became farsighted as well, now my vision is better than 20/20. Oddly, modern science was started in the middle ages by the Catholic church! Disclaimer: I'm not a Catholic, but if Billy Joel is right I should be; he sang "the Catholic girls are easy".
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