The Autoimmune Epidemic by Donna Jackson Nakazawa

Author:Donna Jackson Nakazawa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria
Published: 2008-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

THE AUTOIMMUNE DISEASE DETECTIVES: ERA OF THE MAVERICKS

On an unseasonably windy October Sunday in 2006, four hundred multiple sclerosis patients are gathered at the Maryland chapter of the Multiple Sclerosis Society’s annual conference in Towson, Maryland, to hear scientists discuss hopeful research for MS. Outside, the first fall leaves bluster past the hotel lobby windows like bright, pantomiming hands. But inside the banquet room all eyes are riveted on a short film clip playing on a screen in the front of the room. In the scene a white rat, paralyzed from the waist down, struggles repeatedly to use his front legs to drag the lower half of his body along behind him. Try as he might, he can’t budge an inch.

As the clip ends, the silence in the Sheraton ballroom grows eerie but for the sound of the Oz-like winds picking up again. Too many patients in this ballroom, myself included, know all too well what it feels like to muster every ounce of grit and muscle you possess in the hope your legs will hold your weight, only to lose that struggle over and over again. Everybody in this room knows just what the rat is dreaming of, if rats do dream.

The short film ends. A second begins. The same rat that, moments ago, was unable to move is now racing around a shallow-sided plastic box with the vigor of a rodent triathlete. Call him Regeneration Rat, call him Robo Rodent, call him the Rebound King. He is one of a group of thirteen rodents recently cured of paralysis in a groundbreaking stem-cell study at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.

The audience bursts into enthusiastic applause. One gets the impression that, if they could, the folks who are dependent on wheelchairs, walkers, or canes would be on their feet by now instead of hooting cowboylike bravos and clapping from their seats, letting their voices and hands convey the standing ovation that their bodies cannot.

The researcher they are lauding is the slightly sheepish but smiling Dr. Douglas Kerr, associate professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and principal investigator on this groundbreaking stem-cell study that recently rocked the scientific world. Whether by disposition or by training, Kerr is reluctant to accept the wave of admiration coming his way. He lowers his hands to stem the tide of applause, eager to explain to the crowd how, utilizing embryonic mouse stem cells in a novel set of strategic scientific steps, he has been able to regenerate the damaged axonal nerves and myelin sheaths in paralyzed rats.

“Is this the first time that paralysis has been cured in adult mammals?” a man in the audience calls out from his wheelchair, near the back of the ballroom.

“The first time,” Kerr answers, duly aware that the breakthrough offers a long-overdue gleam of hope on what often seems a bleak scientific horizon for the growing number of Americans facing multiple sclerosis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, transverse myelitis, and a host of other

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