I tried to transcribe the Mullis piece from the Snyder show. I hope
it makes sense.
Doc
Hello all:
Last night I had the opportunity to watch Kary Mullus who won the Nobel
Prize in Chemistry in, I think, 1993. He was on the Tom Snyder show and
they had the following dialogue. There were hand gestures and
inflections that I could not capture so please bear with me.
Snyder: What are you working on ?
Mullis: I'm working with a Company called IRC in Carlsbad which
is near San Diego. We are trying to figure out why it is that
spinal neurons will not grow back after a serious spinal
injury... how you end up dead from the waist down or the
neck down, that kind of thing.
Snyder: Christopher Reeve is wondering about that too.
Mullis: He is and there are 250,000 people wondering about that and
they would be happy to like..try anything that we could come
up with...all kinds of molecular biologists have discovered
recently, like in the past four or five years, all kinds
of genes that are involved in what is called axonal guidance
or how does a neuron that is growing, like a nerve cell, how
does it find the target where it is trying to go. ...that is
a complicated issue but it is not as complicated as I
thought at the beginning when we started this project. I said
we'd never figure that out ...you've got a cable there with a
million conductors, just think about all those wires in the
space and you break it..
Snyder: ..and operating at (clap) that speed.
Mullis: How can you possibly get it back together but those things they
want to grow back. They grow down to the wound usually and then
they start turning around and something happens to them and what
we are trying to do is figure out what that is...
Snyder: What is it that happens ??
Mullis: I think it is..because for example when you break your arm you
loose the feeling in your fingers for awhile but the nerves
grow back. In the spinal cord they stop and I think it is
because they run into something that is intended to be a STOP
sign in a sense for axonal growth....for example, if a neuron
is trying to grow down on one side of your spine it's not a
good idea if it goes back and forth across the mid line because
those on the right come from the right side of the brain,
the one's on the left come from the left side of the
brain....got to keep it separate so there is stuff along
the mid line that says don't come through here...
Snyder: If you could find out what it is ......
Mullis: If we could find out what it is and turn it off. (Making a
twisting motion like twisting a cord) you see what that
does when you crush that thing (spinal cord) those signals
get messed up and they are all of a sudden
inapropriately ...they are all over the wound, they are
made..... if you can figure out what they are and say turn
that off for awhile...
Snyder: Switch the code off
Mullis: so that the axons can grow back through there and then turn
them back on if you want to....because they will figure out
the one that is supposed to go down to your little toe will
get down there..its got to grow a long thing, but I think it
is possible that in the next few years we'll make some real
progress... a lot of people would be smiling up from their
wheel chair..... they would all clearly be happy...