"Now fortunately, even a couple of years before my injury, we were in the dark ages about spinal cord and the common wisdom was that the cord could not regenerate. But I want to say that one of the great heros and really the father of regeneration is a distinguished Canadian who will go down in history as the father of spinal cord recovery. And that is Professor Alberto Aguierro at McGill University. He is the one who discovered that there are two protein molecules at the base of the brain stem. The positive function of these molecules is to stop the brain from overdeveloping during gestation. But then in the adult these protein molecules perform a negative function, they stop the regeneration of nerves in the spinal cord. Now you can chop off your hand then a surgeon can sew it back on again and you can go out and throw a baseball, because of the plasticity and ease with which the peripheral nervous system is able to make appropriate connections. And the good news now for us is that they have discovered nerves regenerate in the spinal cord they seek to find appropriate connections across the injury, across the lesion. And when these appropriate connections are made there will be improvement in sensation and in motor function and depending on the severity of the injury, there are endless possibilities to how much recovery can occur. If someone has been very damaged there may be limitations, if someone is less damaged there may be a better outcome. But the point is, through regeneration the use of human embryonic cells, the use of gene therapy, the spinal cord can and will regenerate and so it is only a question of time before these techniques make their way into humans. One of the most exciting discoveries was made by a Dr. Viscovi in Milan who found that there are cells called epitomal cells which were thought to only exist in again, in the child during gestation, because these cells are undifferentiated and they can become anything. Well, very recently, just two months ago these cells were found to exist in the adult in the ventricles of the brain, in the spinal cord and even in the skin. And this is tremendously exciting because the hope, the best hope for recovery now, is to biopsy these cells from your skin, from your hand for example, they could grow hundreds of thousands of cells in a petri dish and genetically instruct them to become neurons and axons. They would then be injected inside of the injury and they would become the nerves necessary to carry messages from the brain to the rest of the body. Now that would have been science fiction a few years ago, but it's here and it's happening and it doesn't matter whether it's an acute injury or a chronic injury. So I offer you the specific detail, not to give you a boring science lecture but to tell you there is very real tangible hope, very real hope...And one of the great advantages of this technique is that there is no danger of toxicity to the body or rejection by the immune system. And what I love about it is the body is healing itself. Taking cells from one part and using them in another area and I think that's some-how a beautiful design, rather than loading up the body with more chemicals and more drugs and more artificial agents."