Remarkable as Christopher Reeve's rehabilitation has been, doctors know that physical therapy can go only so far. To cure paralysis, they will have to find a way to repair or replace damaged spinal-cord nerves. Most of the research to date has been conducted on laboratory animals, but those experiments have set the stage for what scientists believe could be a burst of advances in human patients. "This is an exciting time in spinal-cord-injury research," says Dr. Wise Young, director of the Center for Collaborative Neuroscience at Rutgers University. "The progress in getting experimental therapies into clinical trials is astounding."
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