What's learned from developing the new probes may, within a decade, offer new hope for people with irreparable spinal cord or serious brain injury. NIH's Institutes for Neurological Disease and Stroke has, in fact, funded a "Neuroprostheses Project" to investigate the use of electronics as neural bridges. These tiny probes may be the prototypes of neural implants to help paraplegics to walk, blind people to see or deaf people to hear. Someone with a severed spinal cord may someday use an electronic implant to pick up command signals from the still-functioning end of the spine, or conversely, from the brain and translate them to nerves or muscles in the legs. For the deaf, we might see implants for direct neural stimulation to the auditory areas of the brain. "Prostheses are not our long-term goal," Kewley states. But Bower lab probes, in the hands of clinical researchers-inventors, might be modified into tools to liberate people with many different kinds of sensory problems.

"Of course, the SF reader will immediately think, `Oh, I'll be able to plug my brain into my computer some day using a multichannel probe'," Kewley laughs. "But high-level thought of the kind you'd need in order to interface with a computer defies the understanding of the nervous system now."

-- Kathleen Stein