Moving on up
Christopher Reeve is looking for it. So is Leo Per Hallan, who has come all the way from South Dakota to Beijing to find it: a cure for paralysis.
Hallan sits in his wheelchair in a newly built foreigners' wing in the brick-red Chaoyang Hospital, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes. A look of incredulity spreads over his face as he describes how he felt the touch of another human being on his wrist for the first time in 28 years.
'I don't want to say anything I'm not 100 per cent sure of,' says the burly, 48-year-old rights activist, who has been disabled since a motorcycle accident when he was 20. If anything, Hallan plays down the results of an operation 11 days earlier by pioneering Chinese neurosurgeon Dr Huang Hongyun. 'When you touch me it's not like normal. But it's there. When the nurse came to take my pulse she touched my left arm and I could feel it. I was smiling and she thought I was smiling at the ball game behind her on the television. But I wasn't.'
Something momentous is happening in the community of spinal-cord injury victims: hope is growing, perhaps for the first time, that they may one day be cured, or at least see their condition improve markedly. Spurred by celebrity advocate and quadriplegic Reeve and discoveries about stem and foetal cells, research into spinal-cord injury has undergone a revolution. New therapies are being tested and one of the most startling - and controversial - is being assessed in Beijing by Huang.
For decades, conventional medical wisdom has held that there is no cure for paralysis and Huang is keen to stress what he is doing is not curing but improving. The old no-hope message is drummed into medical students, meaning treatment focuses on damage limitation immediately after injury, putting patients in a chair, appointing a carer and maintaining their health - and sanity - as far as possible. The continuing despair felt by Hong Kong quadriplegic Tang Siu-pun, known as Ah Pun, after a somersault accident left him paralysed, led to his request to legislators to let him die.
The traditional approach to paralysis never was good enough for many sufferers and in Reeve they found an advocate who has propelled their cause into the public eye in a way 100 years of shaking a charity collection box on a street corner could not have done.
Chair-bound since a 1995 accident when he was thrown from his horse, Buck, during a riding competition in Virginia in the United States, Reeve has metamorphosed into a compelling advocate for aggressive research and treatment for spinal-cord injury. The Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation now offers about US$8 million a year in research grants. Reeve takes a personal interest in the awarding of applications and is a supporter of increasingly daring medical methods, including testing on humans. So optimistic has he become about new therapies he says he believes he will walk again 'within three to five years'.