news story: retarded girl gets partial brain transplant; improves brain function

[Randy]

I heard this snippet of a story on a Paul Harvey radio newscast today.
Apparently this girl got a partial (small scale?) brain transplant and
this apparently allowed her to walk and improved her brain function. I
wondered if anyone in this newsgroup had heard of this; it would be
interesting to find out how much of a transplant it was how much it
changed her, personality-wise, if at all.

[Peter C. McCluskey]

Randy (rsm...@bayou.uh.edu) writes (in <4804s4$k...@masala.cc.uh.edu>):

I wonder whether nerves in the brain regenerate well enough for
transplanted nerves to connect adequately. I had read of some
promising research in this area, but didn't think it was ready to
be tried on humans.
A novel by Charles Sheffield, _My Brother's Keeper_, has some
interesting and probably fairly realistic speculations about the
effects of a partial brain transplant.
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[David L Evens]

Randy (rsm...@bayou.uh.edu) wrote:
: I heard this snippet of a story on a Paul Harvey radio newscast today.

: Apparently this girl got a partial (small scale?) brain transplant and
: this apparently allowed her to walk and improved her brain function. I
: wondered if anyone in this newsgroup had heard of this; it would be
: interesting to find out how much of a transplant it was how much it
: changed her, personality-wise, if at all.

There have been experiments in transplanting tissue into the brains of
patients with certain neuro-degenerative diseases to try and reverse the
cell death, but this doesn't sound like a terribly feasible operation
that you describe here.

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[Harlan Hoffman]

In <4804s4$k...@masala.cc.uh.edu> Randy <rsm...@bayou.uh.edu> writes:
>
>I heard this snippet of a story on a Paul Harvey radio newscast today.
>Apparently this girl got a partial (small scale?) brain transplant and

>this apparently allowed her to walk and improved her brain function. I

>wondered if anyone in this newsgroup had heard of this; it would be
>interesting to find out how much of a transplant it was how much it
>changed her, personality-wise, if at all.
>

can't help but try to find a joke in this story; well here goes...
Of course this is a viable possibility, isn't it so, that Dan Quayle
was legally brain dead, at one point and was given a 'shit' Fly's brain
to finish out his VP term?

[Anders Sandberg]

I seriously doubt an actual transplant of tissue will
work today, since you have to make it reconnect nicely.

But there might be other methods. I found a reference
in "Recombinant DNA" by Watson about a line of
immortalized neural precursors with temperature-dependent
states, when injected into mice they began differentiating
and apparently could improve recovery from brain damage.
I haven't read the article, but here is the reference:

"Immortalized Retinal Neurons Derived from SV40 T-antigen
Inducing Tumors in Transgenic Mice", Hamming J. P., E. E
Baerger, R. R. Behringer, R. L. Brinster, R. D. Palmiter,
A. Messing, Neuron 4: 775-772 1990

Maybe one could do something like this to help repair
brain damage?
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