Anatomy Shared Article Research

This blog exists for the Anatomy students at Tree of Life Christian School. We will be reading various scientific articles, summarizing our research, and then commenting on others' summaries. We hope to broaden our view of the current research surrounding the human body, and to help others see how truly amazing the design of the human body is.

Friday, October 17, 2008

Bypassing paralyzed nerves

Summary:
Scientists are now experimenting with restoring movement to paralized limbs. Currently they have been testing on a monkey with a paralyzed arm. They electronically connect the brain to the arm by way of an Electrode planted in the brain that connects to one neuron. This process has promising results except for the fact that they can only have the monkey control one muscle at a time. And to have a functioning arm in daily life one has to be able to control many different muscles at once. Therefore the stumbling block for the scientists right now is how to connect and control all the muscles of the arm at once. Another issiue would be making the electronic chip wireless so someone wouldnt have wires sticking out of there head. Though scientists did admit that the recent experiment was only to show that electronic connection was possible and that they are years if not decades away from anything that could be benifical to humans.

My Response:
I think this kind of research is good. There's nothing controversial about what there doing and its for a good cause. This can provide some hope to people that have been paralized and cannot function on there own. They should continue research since there first experiments have shown that the electronic connection was possible. It could be a while before anything usable is avaliable for humans but this is a step in the right direction.

3 Comments:

Blogger Brian E. said...

This is the link for the website
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/37657/title/Bypassing_paralyzed_nerves

Friday, October 17, 2008 4:34:00 AM  
Blogger Sarah said...

I think it would be great if they are able to restore movement to paralized limbs. It is amazing how much we know and can do with the help of science and technology. I hope that they can figure out how to connect the muscles and be able to control more than one muscle at a time, so that in the future this will be an effective way of restoring movement to paralized limbs.

Saturday, October 18, 2008 7:36:00 AM  
Blogger Nick said...

This is a great article! It's is amazing how the human mind can figure out solutions to these kinds of problems. Even though they haven't figured out how to connect all of the muscles, the fact that they have come this close is astonishing. Once the discovery of how to move all of the muscles is made, it will change the world.

Thursday, October 23, 2008 1:47:00 PM  

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