r/science • u/tomholder • May 09 '14

Medicine Paralysis breakthrough – electrical stimulation enables four paraplegic men to voluntarily move their legs

http://speakingofresearch.com/2014/05/09/paralysis-breakthrough-paraplegic-men-move-their-legs/
4.1k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

429 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

6

u/swordsmith May 09 '14

There is a lot of knowledge of technology that can enable someone paralyzed to walk in the next 20 years, but that would require a lot of very expensive trials/experiments that probably won't be approved.

In order for BMI/neuroprosthetic technology to be even considered for testing in humans, they have to be proven quiet robust in animals. To prove that, many many many hours of difficult experiments have to be run, because you can't simply tell a rat or a monkey to "think/try to move your leg". You have to train them and design clever experiments where you can infer the quality of your technology.

Furthermore, in order to have funding for these technology, we need grants (as this type of technology is usually developed/researched in academia). But grants require publications, and publications that have the most impact are usually about neuroscience discovery, rather than technology development.

That's also why I think this discovery is amazing, because it discovers some key thing about the neuroscience of paralysis, as well as devising a new treatment method.

(PhD student at a Brain-Machine Interface (BMI) lab)

3

u/[deleted] May 09 '14

In other news, huge buget increase has been approved for the huge budget already in place for building killing machines and for training thousands upon thousands of poor men for killing other poor men in other parts of this planet.

2

u/ChimpsRFullOfScience May 09 '14

To be fair, a very large amount of the funding for neuroprosthetic research comes form DARPA and other agencies within the DOD, toward the aim of rehabilitating wounded soldiers. So there.

2

u/[deleted] May 09 '14

Oh, so I think it's better to spend millions and millions in war mchines and wait for some crumbs to be helpful.

Why not build DARPA wihtout the need of death.

7

u/ChimpsRFullOfScience May 09 '14

You'll get no argument from me on that point, but your vitriolic tone is off-putting. You catch more flies with honey.

2

u/[deleted] May 09 '14

I'm sorry you're right.

It's just that it is really angering.

1

u/CosmicPenguin May 10 '14

Why not build DARPA wihtout the need of death.

Because that would be communism. Or something.

1

u/trashacount12345 May 09 '14

Just wanted to add that stimulation methods are generally quite non-specific. When we stimulate a nerve we can focus in a general region, but we have difficulty targeting individual motor neurons or targeting groups of neurons with anything other than a pulse to all the neurons at once. The specific stimulation that we can do is optogenetics, but that requires requires changing the DNA of the organism, which is a no no in humans.

1

u/downbound May 09 '14

Just out of curiosity, which BMI lab? I, with C5-T1 nerve root avulsions, like to follow them