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" Originally published in the December 2005 &amp;quot;Best and Brightest&amp;quot; issue There are other things Wise Young would really like to be doing. His eyes light up when he talks about the research they are doing at his lab, figuring out ways to use umbilical-cord blood cells to bridge damaged spines. He&amp;#039;s visibly excited by the &amp;quot;massive cascading effects&amp;quot; of lithium \u2014 there&amp;#039;s evidence it can even cure osteoporosis, and no research is being done! He gets positively lyrical on the magical ability of the axons to find their way through the body, like brave Ulysses finding his way back to Penelope. And he says all this with the authority of a man who discovered a breakthrough treatment for spinal injury at twenty-nine, who founded the Journal of Neurotrauma and the International Neurotrauma Society in his thirties and gave his forties to building a cutting-edge research lab at Rutgers University, the W. M. Keck Center for Collaborative Neuroscience in Piscataway, New Jersey. In his spare time, he&amp;#039;s helping link China&amp;#039;s spinal-trauma centers into a vast clinical network capable of doing state-of-the-art clinical trials with all the protocols required by the medical journals on as many as six thousand patients a year.  Instead, he&amp;#039;s here in the backyard of a small ranch house in New Jersey, bending down to hug a paralyzed rapper named Professir X. He widens the circle to introduce a paralyzed psychologist named Karen Hwang. &amp;quot;This guy will blow you away,&amp;quot; he tells her, resting his hand on the handle of her wheelchair. Hwang was felled by a car accident, Professir X by a stray bullet. And there&amp;#039;s Charlie Newman, paralyzed thirty-two years ago next month. And Phyllis Reilly, who has Parkinson&amp;#039;s. Young moves among them, trading hugs and smiles. He&amp;#039;s here as part of his other career, as the crusading scientist-activist who teamed up with Christopher Reeve to double the budget of the National Institutes of Health and campaigned for the stem-cell initiatives in California and New Jersey. In April, he led the largest wheelchair roll on Washington in history. As soon as he starts talking, a feeling of calm wisdom spreads across the backyard. With his salt-and-pepper beard and pens stuffed into his pocket, he seems so modest and reasonable. He&amp;#039;s earnest and logical, never strident. He says they have to keep talking to the fundamentalists, they&amp;#039;re good people and they mean well. But there&amp;#039;s a doctor in Korea who has developed stem-cell lines from people with spinal-cord injuries and it looks like he&amp;#039;s going to implant those stem cells back into them to try to bridge the spinal-cord injury \u2014 one step closer to a cure! And there&amp;#039;s great work being done in China and Portugal, where scientists are doing daring things with nasal cells. But George Bush&amp;#039;s strict limitations on federal research funding and lawsuits by right-to-life groups have stopped most embryonic-stem-cell research in the United States \u2014 and there are hundreds of thousands of embryos sitting in freezers at fertility clinics, most waiting to be thrown out. &amp;quot;My point isn&amp;#039;t abortion or not abortion,&amp;quot; he says, in the same reasonable tone. &amp;quot;These things are sitting in a freezer. Why throw them away?&amp;quot; Fate seems to have designed Young to become a medical ambassador. Born in 1950 in Hong Kong, the son of an innovative Chinese businessman who built the first mall in Hong Kong, he grew up in Japan and attended the American School with the kids of international businessmen and diplomats. He decided to be a doctor when he was eight. But his father expected his sons to come work for him. &amp;quot;Why do you want to be a doctor?&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;If you want to help people, come work for me and you can hire ten doctors.&amp;quot;  Dogged but never confrontational, Young stood his ground. Soon his father took him aside and told him he was too honest looking to be a proper businessman. &amp;quot;People can read your face. You can do what you want.&amp;quot; He ended up at Reed College in Oregon right at the peak of the 1960s, worlds away from the rigid culture of his childhood. By the time he arrived at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory to do research for his Ph.D. in biophysics, he was an unusual character. &amp;quot;There was a total guilelessness,&amp;quot; remembers his wife, Lily, who was there to work on a Ph.D. in environmental microbiology. &amp;quot;We were all scientists, everybody was doing their thing, everybody was hoping they would be doing something that hadn&amp;#039;t been done before. Not that many people were that communicative. He&amp;#039;d talk your ear off. He&amp;#039;s still that way. And it&amp;#039;s not just chatter. It&amp;#039;s You&amp;#039;ve got to be as interested in this subject as I am.&amp;quot; As they began to date, he surprised her by inviting a professor to dinner. &amp;quot;I would never invite a professor. And he would say, &amp;#039;Why not?&amp;#039; &amp;quot; His heroes were doctors who had no barriers with their patients. In Mexico, a poor doctor taught him how to diagnose diabetes by tasting urine: If it tastes sweet, then sugar levels are too high. And diarrhea caused by salmonella has a very different smell than viral diarrhea or diarrhea caused by E. coli. Another doctor was famous for crying during surgery. &amp;quot;He specialized in mastectomy,&amp;quot; Young remembers. &amp;quot;Tears would be rolling down his cheeks when he was taking out the breast of a woman, and the nurses were always ready with things to pat his eyes dry. He mourned the loss of the breast for the woman. And the patients loved him. He was for them, they knew it. And they were for him.&amp;quot; He tells these stories to explain how he ended up barnstorming the backyards of New Jersey. He was on fire to be a neurosurgeon when a seventeen-year-old high school wrestler came into his surgery ward with a broken neck. Young had to tell him there was no hope, that he would be paralyzed for life, which was the conventional wisdom of the time.  A year and a half later, he got an idea. He knew that swelling caused a lot of the damage in spinal-cord injuries and that a steroid called methylprednisolone was effective in treating swelling of the brain. A team of researchers was already trying low doses on spinal-cord patients. But what if you tried a massive dose? He experimented on animals and the results were spectacular. One test of nerve response went from flat to normal in twenty-four hours. It took another five years to get the National Institutes of Health to fund a real clinical test. Experts said his patients would die of gastric ulcers or falling blood pressure or immune failure. It took another five years to get from phase one to the final double-blind human study. But again, the results were thrilling. After testing 498 spinal-cord-injury patients, those who received a high dose of MP recovered more than twice the mobility of those who received a placebo.His results were published in 1990 in The New England Journal of Medicine and even made the front page of The New York Times. At that point, Young figured his job was done. He had done all the right things, hit all the right marks \u2014 gotten NIH funding, followed all the rigorous protocols, published in the best scientific journals. Now he could go back to neurosurgery. But a year went by and he found out that only half of the people with freshly injured spines were actually getting MP \u2014 and that was the big eye-opener. &amp;quot;I really thought everybody would embrace it. It&amp;#039;s a safe drug, and it&amp;#039;s cheap. It wasn&amp;#039;t a $20,000 drug with 10 percent mortality \u2014 it was zero mortality and $100. Who wouldn&amp;#039;t take it?&amp;quot; With that, his real work began. If methylprednisolone was going to get a chance to work its magic, someone was going to have to push it. For the next four years, he gave lectures at any hospital or medical school that would take him. When 90 percent of American patients were getting the drug, he started on Europe and Asia. And Washington. In the early 1990s, working with the National Council on Spinal Cord Injury and a disabled Boston real estate tycoon named Arthur Ullian, Young began trying to convince Congress to fund spinal-injury research. He turned out to be a natural-born testifier, Ullian recalls, his passion to communicate perfectly tempered by his measured tone and deep knowledge. But they quickly realized that wouldn&amp;#039;t be enough. &amp;quot;After the first hearings, we realized you really needed to bring celebrities,&amp;quot; Ullian says.  Then Christopher Reeve fell off his horse, another turning point. Because Reeve was happy to be the token celebrity, but he was also demanding. He would look them in the eye and say, What can you do for me? Young began pushing harder, in more and more directions. He started a spinal-injury Web-site community called CareCure, giving free help and information to thousands of disabled people. He pushed for laws that took a piece of each traffic ticket for spinal-cord-injury research. When Washington agreed to double the NIH research budget in 1997, he accepted an offer from Rutgers University to build a spinal-injury research center in New Jersey. If people worked very, very hard and had enough money, he predicted, they could have a cure within seven years. Then two things happened: George Bush got elected president and the planes hit the World Trade Center on 9/11. Between Bush&amp;#039;s convictions on stem cells and the sudden sucking sound of terrorism-related topics hoovering up all the money that might be used for research, this type of scientific progress in America shut down. There have been no new NIH-funded clinical studies on restoring function in people with spinal-cord injuries. In California, the $3 billion voters pledged to stem-cell research is tied up in lawsuits brought by groups that oppose it. In New Jersey, Democrats in Trenton agreed to put off a vote on funding until after this year&amp;#039;s elections to avoid a challenge from right-to-life groups. In Washington, the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Act has been sitting in committee for three years. Young keeps plugging away in his lab, where he&amp;#039;s most excited about three promising approaches to regenerating spinal cords, in the absence of further advances in embryonic-stem-cell research. Stem cells from umbilical-cord blood will form a bridge across the injury site. Lithium will &amp;quot;kick-start the axons&amp;quot; and send them across the bridge. And a drug called chondroitinase will inhibit the natural body defenses that deploy to fight the sudden nerve growth. But the pressure of current American political realities shows in his careful choice of words on umbilical-cord blood cells, which don&amp;#039;t raise the right-to-life issues that embryonic stem cells do. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re the fastest path toward therapy in the United States,&amp;quot; he says. So Young remembers what he learned from his experience with methylprednisolone. A cure is just an idea. Someone needs to communicate that idea. To do that you have to practice a strange kind of medicine called politics. Yesterday he appeared at the annual meeting of biotech venture capitalists in Baltimore. Embryonic stem cells are the MapQuest of brave Ulysses, he told them, holding the structural secrets of all bodily development \u2014 but it&amp;#039;s differentiated cells that will turn some of you into the Dells and Microsofts of the future. Tonight he sets up his laptop slide projector at a meeting of a Jewish charity called Hadassah. The room is filled with Jewish mothers, so he tells them about a child who is dying of an exotic disease that kills a thousand babies a year in the U. S. Stem cells have cured it in rats, but no research is being done. &amp;quot;The thing that breaks my heart is that we&amp;#039;re waiting and waiting, and we&amp;#039;re asking patients to wait,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Right now, umbilical-cord blood can treat sickle-cell anemia and thalassemia. We should have research centers all over New Jersey. We need to do it now.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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