An Astounding Treatment at an Astounding Price: Who Gets to Benefit?

An Astounding Treatment at an Astounding Price: Who Gets to Benefit?

Tony and Kelly Mantoan, with their boys Teddy and Fulton, who both suffer from SMA, a genetic disorder that makes walking, swallowing, and breathing progressively difficult.

(Courtesy Kelly Mantoan)


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Sarah Watts

Sarah Watts is a health and science writer based in Chicago.

Fetuses can save their mothers' lives

Stem cells from a fetus can travel to the heart and regenerate the muscle, essentially saving a mother’s life.

Adobe Stock

Story by Big Think

In rare cases, a woman’s heart can start to fail in the months before or after giving birth. The all-important muscle weakens as its chambers enlarge, reducing the amount of blood pumped with each beat. Peripartum cardiomyopathy can threaten the lives of both mother and child. Viral illness, nutritional deficiency, the bodily stress of pregnancy, or an abnormal immune response could all play a role, but the causes aren’t concretely known.

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Ross Pomeroy
Steven Ross Pomeroy is the editor of RealClearScience. As a writer, Ross believes that his greatest assets are his insatiable curiosity and his ceaseless love for learning. Follow him on Twitter
New implants let paraplegics surf the web and play computer games

Rodney Gorham, an Australian living with ALS, has reconnected with the world, thanks to a brain-machine interface called the Stentrode.

Rodeny Dekker

When I greeted Rodney Gorham, age 63, in an online chat session, he replied within seconds: “My pleasure.”

“Are you moving parts of your body as you type?” I asked.

This time, his response came about five minutes later: “I position the cursor with the eye tracking and select the same with moving my ankles.” Gorham, a former sales representative from Melbourne, Australia, living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a rare form of Lou Gehrig’s disease that impairs the brain’s nerve cells and the spinal cord, limiting the ability to move. ALS essentially “locks” a person inside their own body. Gorham is conversing with me by typing with his mind only–no fingers in between his brain and his computer.

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Stav Dimitropoulos
Stav Dimitropoulos's features have appeared in major outlets such as the BBC, National Geographic, Scientific American, Nature, Popular Mechanics, Science, Runner’s World, and more. Follow her on Facebook or Twitter @TheyCallMeStav.