Rejoining the Spinal Cord

Toronto's controversial Dr. Gordon Murray performed the first blue-baby operations and kidney transplants in Canada and says he built the first workable artificial kidney in North America. At one time, Dr. Murray claimed to have a serum that alleviated the suffering of breast-cancer victims, although its effectiveness was never proved. Last week, at 73, Dr. Murray reported that he had accomplished a feat that has eluded specialists in neurosurgery. He has, he said, successfully rejoined severed spinal cords in four of seven paralyzed patients.

Characteristically, Dr. Murray reported his work at a fund-raising dinner. Unexpectedly, he had a patient wheeled into the ballroom. The patient: Bertrand Proulx, 24, a Quebec truck driver whose spinal cord was injured in an accident four years ago, had not been able to move his hands or elbows and breathed with his diaphragm because he could not expand his chest.

To show what Dr. Murray had accomplished, Proulx pulled on slings attached to a bar over the bed and lifted himself to a sitting position. He needed nurses' help to get off the bed, but then he stood in a walker, waved one arm high, heaved himself into a comfortable position on the bed, and took a drink from a glass. Proulx "hadn't moved a joint for three years," said Dr. Murray. "But this fellow is going to walk."

Never Before. The spinal cord is a cylinder of whitish-grey mush surrounded by a tough casing, running through the hollow centers of the vertebrae and intervertebral discs. Inside the cord are nerve cells and main nerve tracts like a telephone installer's spaghetti wire. Although smaller nerves in the extremities may regenerate after injury and partial restoration of function is possible if the cord is not completely severed, there is virtually no precedent of rejoining and restoring function to a completely severed spinal cord in man. Dr. Murray offered a simple explanation of previous failure and his apparent success: when a cord is severed it retracts, thus becoming shorter than the corresponding length of adjacent vertebrae. To compensate for this difference in length, Murray removed three-quarters of an inch of Proulx's spinal cord at the damaged area, carefully cutting it so that the severed nerve fibers would fit precisely together when reconnected. Murray then cut a matching length of bone from Proulx's vertebrae, completed the operation by rejoining both spinal cord and bone.

Neurosurgeons generally were skeptical of Dr. Murray's report. They recalled a similar case of a woman operated on at Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Hospital in 1901 who recovered for several years, but then suffered a relapse. They insisted that in animal experiments severed ends of cord had been snugly sewn together but that regeneration had been brief at best, due to formation of scar tissue. If Dr. Murray's spinal-cord repair stands the test of time, it will be an impressive achievement indeed.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.