Specific Purpose: To inform the audience about news techniques and mechanisms that aid in nerve regeneration.

Central Idea Statement: The new techniques for nerve regeneration involving magnetic, electrical, and chemical mechanisms look very promising.

I. The site is rather common: someone in a wheel chair unable to use their lower body, or worse, unable to function from their neck down because of an accident. You may even know one of these people. They all have one thing in common: spinal nerve injury. To the majority of us, one of the more famous and recent cases involving spinal trauma is that of Christopher Reeve, known to most of us as Superman. Reeve was riding his horse when he fell off, landed on the back of his head and twisted his neck. His spine was damaged near the second cervical vertebrae; that being two vertebrae away from the base of the skull. He states that after his accident he saw a handbook written in 1990 that "didn't even mention anyone higher than [the fourth cervical vertebrae] because 70 percent of them didn't live longer than five days. I am very lucky my injury happened at a

B. Arthur Lander, a molecular neurobiologist who came to UCI in 1999 from MIT, does research specifically on neural growth and repair. What scientists currently want to learn, he said, is "the fundamental mechanisms that control whether nerve fibers grow and where they grow. It's not good enough just to get them to grow, you've got to get them to connect to the right targets."

A. At present surgeons take a nerve from a less important part of the body and transfer it to the site of the injury. Generally the nerve is taken from the lower leg, but then sensation is lost in that portion of the body. Next, the surgeons attempt to repair the nerves by sewing the proximal and distal ends of the nerves together. However, the results are often disappointing. Even with the operation microscope, surgeons are unable to precisely match the thousands of minute axons, each being approximately 1/100 the diameter of a human hair.

Some common words found in the essay are:
PNS CNS, Dr Saxena, SCI Centers, Christine Schmidt's, Hospital London, Veterinary Science, Canada MIT, Purdue University, Superman Reeve, Idea Statement, spinal cord, nerve regeneration, damaged nerve, nerve fibers, nervous system, spinal cord injury, nerve fiber, cord injury, spinal nerve, magnetic fields, brain spinal, brain spinal cord, growth nerve fibers, consists brain spinal, spinal cord damage,
Approximate Word count = 2174
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)