In the larger port city of Natal, 20 kilometers away, another science school has been up and running since last February with about 600 students, along with a suite of labs equipped for Nico­lelis’s Parkinson’s disease research using transgenic mice. A third neuroscience lab run by Nicolelis’s group, established at the Sírio-Libanês Hospital in the southern city of São Paulo in exchange for the hospital’s sponsorship of the Macaíba clinic, is focused on clinical application of the prosthetics research.

The Macaíba site itself was donated by the state government of Rio Grande do Norte and still lacks a paved access road, but the foundation already has plans for a 5,000-student school, additional lab space, a larger health center, a sports facility and an ecological park to complete what will be the main campus of the International Institute of Neuroscience of Natal (IINN). The Brazilian federal government pledged $25 million toward finishing the complex after President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visited the campus in August with his chief of staff and minister of education in tow. Nicolelis had given what he calls “the most important PowerPoint talk of my career” to the president, who is universally known as “Lula,” a few weeks earlier.

   
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