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Feb 19, 2009 | 1
In May 2001, Israeli parents of a nine-year old boy with a crippling disease that left him wheelchair-bound took their child to see doctors in Moscow. In a highly experimental procedure that was presumably unavailable in their home country, those doctors injected fetal stem cells into various regions of his brain.
The boy’s parents—they aren’t named in a report describing the case in this week’s PLoS Medicine—must have been desperate. The nine-year old suffered from ataxia-telangiectasia, a childhood disease that causes degeneration of parts of the brain that control muscle movements and speech. The symptoms include slurred speech, poor balance, impaired immune function, and the appearance of red spider veins called telangiectasias in the eyes, ears or cheeks.
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BecCrew MT @jeanne_erdmann Great read - The Story Trumps Everything: an Interview with Deborah Blum http://t.co/ymsrDitDC1 BecCrew You call yourself a museum! http://t.co/EcLccYoD4y via @alexvitlin
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