The global scientific community has requested rigorous clinical trials to verify the claims of a Moscow research team who reportedly treated complete paralysis by simply unhooking a patient's old central nervous system and clicking a new one into place.
The global scientific community has requested a rigorous multi-center trial to verify the claims of a Moscow research team who reportedly treated complete paralysis by simply unhooking a patient's old central nervous system and clicking a brain-dead donor's tissue into place. The unprecedented procedure, first detailed in a largely unformatted preprint shared with New Scientist, has sent shockwaves through a field that has spent decades meticulously mapping microscopic axon pathways.
According to the document, the Russian surgical team bypassed traditional cellular therapies entirely, opting instead for a novel technique in which they sliced a chunk of spinal cord out of a cadaver and aggressively jammed it into a living human being. While the biological viability remains unfathomable, independent neuroscientists admit they are mesmerized by the sheer, unbridled confidence of the intervention.
We have spent thirty years trying to coax microscopic nerve fibers across a millimeter gap, so to see a team just grab a spare central nervous system out of a cooler and go to town is, frankly, a paradigm shift.
However, researchers caution that the single-patient study is not yet statistically significant. A team at an MIT bioengineering lab noted that to satisfy the rigors of the scientific method, the Russian surgeons must successfully splice at least forty more donor spines into living patients in a double-blind setting, where half the control group receives a length of heavy-duty coaxial cable.
The lead Russian researcher has promised to formally submit the methodology to a Nature peer-review board just as soon as the patient regains consciousness and stops trying to walk in two different directions at once.