Neuralstem CEO Blog
- “The accident was a horrible thing - but that horrible thing made Chris, at the end of his life, Superman. It's a happy irony if there is such a thing. I'm proud to have known him.”
Morgan Freeman
Posted January 15, 2013
Yesterday, Neuralstem announced that the FDA approved our spinal cord injury trial (SCI). It’s hard not to think of Chris Reeve at a time like this. I actually met him once, at a dinner party in London in 1979. He was filming the second Superman movie, a remarkably quiet and unassuming young man given his enormous physical gifts and burgeoning fame. That he is synonymous now with the effort to cure spinal cord injury is a tribute to the efforts he put into his foundation’s work from the time of his accident until his death.
- “A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents simply die off. Science progresses one funeral at a time.”
- Max Planck 1918
(Nobel Prize winner for discovery of the quantum theory of physics)
Posted December 31, 2012
As 2012 draws to a close, I would like to reflect on the “bigger picture” of Neuralstem’s technology, and how we fit into the scheme of things from a historical perspective. Stepping back, just a bit, enables a clearer picture than sometimes emerges from the noise and chaos of the constant stream of evaluations and opinions we are all bombarded with. And when we step back and see how many of the other stem cell technologies have fallen into irrelevance (they never die as Dr. Planck observed) we can also better understand where we are on our path.
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Lazar Wolf: How is your brother-in-law? In America?
Tevye: Oh, he's doing very well.
Lazar Wolf: Oh, he wrote you?
Tevye: No, not lately.
Lazar Wolf: Then how do you know?
Tevye: If he was doing badly, he would write.
(Fiddler on the Roof)
Posted December 4, 2012
Sometimes, I think this may be the most misunderstood truth about clinical trials. In the interim period between treatment and the release of data, no news is (generally) good news. A recent article in Crain’s Detroit Business blared out the headline “ALS patient is living his second miracle.”
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“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”
(Emma Goldman)
Posted November 12, 2012
While I am not in the habit of quoting anarchists, I think Ms. Goldman’s observation may be particularly apt as we awake this Veteran’s Day holiday to a political landscape that is surprisingly unchanged. The American electorate has once again spoken with a fractured voice. A Congress with the lowest approval ratings (well deserved) in the history of approval ratings has been returned to the Hill almost unchanged. And a president and Senate of the opposite party, thought to be in disarray, have also been told to go back to work.
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“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
William Shakespeare (Henry VI, Part II)
Posted October 26, 2012
It seems that a story appears in the news almost every day about the dangers of youth sports and traumatic brain injuries and concussions. It was recently reported that 5 young boys, all under the age of 12, received concussions in a single Pop Warner tackle football game in Massachusetts. In a recent editorial in the New York Times, a renowned neurosurgeon and researcher laid out the scope and risks of concussions and brain injuries that derive from children playing sports. In yet another story a local high school has been told to shut down their football program. “If we don’t shut it down, the lawyers will shut it down for us,” they were told. This story then goes on to criticize the idea of cutting back on contact in practice to make the sport safer. It likens that to the tobacco companies once saying that putting filters on their cigarettes made them safer.
