Research Project’s Lofty Goal: a Cure for Paralysis : Scientists set out to destroy a medical dogma holding that the neurons of the central nervous system cannot be repaired.

Daniel Ruiz had not stood up in more than 10 years, since that Friday afternoon in 1983 when his motorcycle was run off the road and he awoke two days later to hear doctors say he would never walk again.

Ruiz, now 26, is still a paraplegic, unable to control his legs or to feel anything from the chest down. But thanks to a device called Parastep, an experimental walker outfitted with electrical leads that attach to his legs and stimulate the muscles, Ruiz is able to stand and walk.

“My personal record is 1,280 feet,” he says, indicating his path through the rehabilitation center he attends three days a week. “But the best thing is to be able to stand and look other people in the eye.”

As excited as Ruiz is about his fledgling mobility, the Parastep device is merely a tiring, short-term alternative to a wheelchair. More exciting, to Ruiz and thousands of others who have suffered debilitating spinal cord injuries, is what’s going on across the plaza from the rehab center at the University of Miami’s Medical School.

Here doctors and researchers are offering bold predictions about something that just a few years no one dared to dream of: a cure for paralysis.

“Within this decade,” says Richard P. Bunge, an MD and neuroscientist. “I know that the word cure has been controversial from the beginning. But recognizing that cure may mean movement in a limb that is now paralyzed, I have come to be comfortable with it.”

Bunge is scientific director of the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, a research effort whose very name suggests nothing less than the destruction of a medical dogma older than Hippocrates himself. That dogma held that the neurons of the central nervous system could not be repaired, and that paralysis was forever.

The Miami project was founded in 1985 by Miami neurosurgeon Barth Green after a Washington, D.C., businessman who was newly paralyzed offered to raise the money for an all-out research effort.

That same year, Marc Buoniconti, 19-year-old son of former Miami Dolphins All-Pro Nick Buoniconti, became a quadriplegic after a spine-crushing tackle while playing football for the Citadel. Marc’s injury, along with his father’s celebrity and fund-raising efforts, focused public attention on spinal cord injuries and pushed the Miami project into the forefront of research efforts.

The project, which operates on an annual budget of $6.5 million, made headlines two years ago by announcing success in regenerating nerve fibers in the human nervous system. That development led researchers to wonder about injecting Schwann cells--the helper cells that keyed the regeneration--into spines that have been severed or injured.

Can damaged spinal nerve cells, abetted by helper cells from elsewhere in the body, repair themselves?

A positive answer to that question could give patients such as Danny Ruiz hope of once again moving limbs now locked and numb.

Bunge says that hope is justified. “The goal we have set is extremely ambitious and difficult, and has put pressure on us as scientists,” he says. Indeed, the pressure at the Miami project, which combines research with clinical work, is intense.

Although research scientists in most facilities do not see the patients they are attempting to help, “The wheelchairs are in our face,” Bunge says. “They come through our hallways. They are patients who now have an incurable disease, and they want to be first in line for any treatment that might work.”

Of course, it’s not that easy. Complex research on regenerating spinal cells in rats continues, as do clinical studies on fertility among paralyzed men. After years during which he was told he could not father children, for example, Ruiz has recently learned that he can.

In other research centers, breakthroughs have been reported in using transplanted fetal cells to replace lost neurons and drugs that can reduce the damage of spinal cord injuries if given within hours of the trauma.

Each year about 10,000 Americans suffer spinal cord injuries. About half occur to young adults between the ages of 16 and 30. The leading cause of paralysis is traffic accidents, followed by gunshot wounds, falls and diving and other sports injuries.

Danny Ruiz was a running back on his high school football team at the time of his motorcycle accident. Five days before his 16th birthday, he was told that he would never walk again and never have children. But he knows now that might not be true.

“What’s going on here,” he says, “has given me hope. I see things in a different perspective. The idea of being able to have kids, to walk--it makes life in a chair right now seem not so bad. I’m still alive. I’m not dead.

“And you know what I really want to do? Run.”