Douglas Steinberg | Dec 9, 2001 | 7 min read
After spending the early 1970s studying regeneration in the Xenopus frog tadpole's optic nerve, Paul J. Reier began to ponder how mammalian spinal cord injuries (SCIs) might heal. Eventually, the junior professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine chose to enter an emerging field: fetal cell transplantation into the spinal cord. A colleague called the career move crazy--a judgment that Reier now admits wasn't totally unwarranted. "The spinal cord injury field was clouded by pessimi