Right now scientists are trying to figure absence of an environment suitable for out how to retrain the immune system, embryonic stem cell research, it’s likely or distract it from the myelin, so that the our progress will be stalled in legal limbo. axons can recover, and signals get sent the Like cells cryogenically preserved on a right places. Part of this method also relies phase of growth arrest, researchers in on telling growing axons how to start Ireland cannot avail of new stem cell growing again. And part of this process technologies, because the fate of the involves removing the stop signalsundifferentiated cells has yet to be legally including the appropriately named “nodetermined. go” protein, to help neurons reconnect. The Irish Stem Cell Foundation is pushing for better recognition of the need for legislation for this issue. Dr Unblocking the brain Stephen O’Sullivan, a leading pioneer Not all advances in neuroscience are of such research in Ireland wh o recently reliant on complicated engineering. One left for warmer climates in the US, has method of removing blood clots from the said the status of the research is “very brain is a simple tiny cork-screw device. disillusioning”. Efforts were made back Glial stem cells. Image: Robert Sicko. This corkscrew made by Concetrics, is in 2005 to generate legal guidelines for inserted through the femoral artery in the the government on stem cell research; groin. From here it is threaded up to the however, thanks to economic and political upheavals it has been carotid artery in the neck and from there it can rove around the put on the back-burner. brain’s blood supply until the blood clot is found. Once found the blood vessel can be uncorked — and normal blood flow can resume. A REMEDI for the brain. It’s not all bad news for stem cell research in Ireland though. In Galway at the Regenerative Medicine Institute (REMEDI) led by Time travelling brains Prof. Tim O’Brien, scientists are re-engineering cells, to generate You may wonder if we could freeze our brain, and our new living tissues. perception of things changing, then we could also freeze time? Deep inside your breastbone, inside the When we go asleep our brains stop their bone-marrow, thousands of immune cells conscious activity. Yet when we wake up are generated every day, to help you fight they can get back on track within seconds. Myelin off germs. These new cells, also known Perhaps if we managed to stay in this state sheath as mesenchymal stem cells, can divide of sleep for hundreds of years and wake up into all kinds of different connective and again, we could travel through time — albeit immune cells. And thanks to some elegant very slowly. biological engineering, at REMEDI they can During the night, our hearts pump be engineered into many other types of cells, essential nutrients into the brain to keep including the oligodendrocytes which make ticking along. So if you wanted to keep your the fatty myelin that allows axons to fire, and brain in suspended animation, you’d need reconnect nerves in the spine after car crashes. to supply adequate oxygen and food to keep working on a low level throughout your long sleep. If you could, then perhaps you MS-taken identity could sleep and wake up Rip Van Winkle style a hundred years Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a disorder which makes it difficult later in a brand new shiny body. for people to move. This is because the long axons which shoot At the moment the best bet offered to would be time signals from the brain to muscle fibers aren’t properly insulated travellers is cryogenics. Cryogenically freezing your head with fatty myelin sheaths. Electrical signals don’t fire properly literally means putting your brain in the and people lose the ability to move. Some deep freeze until such a time as science can people think perhaps the body’s own immune re-animate your mind. If you consider the system mistakenly recognizes proteins on the desiccated and unpalatable state of micromyelin sheath as a foreign invader, and slowly wave dinners hiding at the bottom of your and progressively tries to eat away at it. own deep freeze — you mightn’t want to go In order to kill invading cells, your body for the cryogenic option. needs to be able to tell them apart from existing cells. If your arm was sore, you wouldn’t cut it off. Likewise if your brain is damaged, your Sage advice. immune system knows better than to kill off In the Middle Ages people thought Sage large chunks of your brain-cells. Normally that is. was good for the brain, and wise old people However for patients with MS, their killer- t-cells were known as sages. Fast-forward a few think that myelin is a foreign body and start to hundred years and thanks to modern science produce antibodies to kill it off. Estrogen, the we’ve purified the active ingredients in sage, female sex hormone helps regulate antibody body fed them to people and tested its effects on production. It’s thought this is the reason women memory. True to form, the folks who had are more likely to develop MS than men. In fact sage performed better on memory recall tests when women are pregnant and estrogen levels are than those who had none. Funnily enough, lower MS symptoms are much reduced. whether its fish-oils, or pharmaceuticals like