at the Democratic National Convention, whence Franklin Delano Roosevelt four times accepted the presidential nomination from a wheelchair, Christopher Reeve asked not for sympathy but for assistance -- and the chance to walk again.
Paralyzed from the neck down by a fall from a horse, Reeve reminded his audience that every American was important. "If America is really a family, we have to recognize that many members of our family are hurting," said the man who portrayed Superman in the Hollywood blockbuster. "One in five has some kind of disability."
© AP photo of Reeve at the Convention/J.Scott Applewhite.
Reeve urged increased funding for research into spinal-cord research. "When we put our minds to a problem, we find solutions. We have to give our scientists the chance."
On May 27, 1995, while riding in a horse-jumping competition, Reeve's mount balked, and he flew straight into a tree. With his hands tangled in the reins, he was unable to protect his head and neck from the impact.
The collision sent him to the hospital. Without artificial respiration given by an alert spectator, he would have gone to the grave since the fall damaged the nerves that directed his breathing muscles. As it was, injury to his spinal cord, just below the first vertebra, deprived Reeve of motor and sensory function from the neck down.
The irony was not lost on the media -- or the public:
"Superman" was a quadriplegic.
For someone in Reeve's situation, constant care is a given. Dependence comes with the territory. And, until recently, the odds of major improvement have been close to zero. (Need to contactstatistics Cure Paralysis Now?)
The core of the problem is that the spinal cord carries sensory and motor (defined) signals between the brain and most of the body. Yet it's one of the few tissues in the adult body that does not grow, so what gets broken stays broken. Although it's common to see some improvement during the first few months after an injury, after that it is a dead end.
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Update [posted 5 Mar 1998]
According to new reports, however, the spinal cord can work alone to give a certain amount of locomotion. The spinal cord apparently has an ability to coordinate movement even when it's not connected to the brain. In an experiment published in 1995, Anton Wernig improved the walking ability of 89 incompletely paralyzed people. (See "Laufband [treadmill] Therapy..." in the bibliography). |
The therapy is now being tested at the University of Bonn, Germany, and at the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis. The key is to support the upper body and teach the legs to walk again. We're not claiming that it cures paralysis, but some experts are getting enthusiastic after seeing some patients who have spent years in wheelchairs gain a limited ability to walk (see "Teaching the Spinal Cord... " in the bibliography).
Where nerves no longer travel, nerve impulses don't either. And that leaves the 10,000 new cases of spinal cord injury (most are men injured in auto crashes) in varying degrees of disability, frustration and desperation. Some have made good lives for themselves. Others have been overcome by a depth of hopelessness that cannot be imagined by anyone lucky enough to have an intact spinal cord.
Reeve chose to fight. He became a star pupil in the New Jersey rehabilitation center which taught him the rudiments of life in a wheelchair. He went out on the hustings. Before his speech at the Democratic Convention, he appeared at the Oscar ceremony. He also hosted the 1996 Paralympic Games in Atlanta, and raised money for the Reeve-Irvine Research Center, a new institute devoted to spinal-cord research. (To read more about Reeve's life.)
All along, his message was this: with enough research, a spinal-cord injury will no longer be a life-long sentence to a wheelchair. Just before Reeve's dramatic convention speech, scientists in Sweden unveiled exciting new evidence that they could grow working new adult mammalian spinal cord.
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