- [Lucas] I was on a back road.
That's where the bad part of the day began.
So, I see a deer and swerve to go around him
and soon as that truck started going sideways,
it threw me out the window.
The doctor told me there was a 1% chance of recovery.
It's a lost cause.
- We've been through about 4,000 years of history
where the answer was the same.
"I don't know if you're gonna walk again.
"I don't know if you're gonna be functional again."
Before he had the procedure,
he could not have held a baseball in his hand.
When I first injected these stem cells into Lucas,
I have absolutely no idea what's gonna happen.
This is one of the first times it's in a human being.
It's always a dream to do one thing
in a person's career that changes the paradigm.
It turns out it actually worked.
When I was a little kid, I wanted to be truck driver.
And then my mentor, here when I came to the United States,
suggested I should be neurosurgeon.
But ever since I picked neurosurgery,
I've never looked back.
To go and tell a person like Lucas,
who was in the prime of their life that,
"You're never gonna walk again,"
that's something I'll never get used to.
- He was in a coma for three days.
To be trapped inside of a body that's not responding
to what he wants it to do,
it was more than I could take.
- Be at zero function.
So, he couldn't move anything,
he couldn't sense anything,
his bladder and bowel wouldn't work.
- [Karen] He could move shoulders was all we could see.
He couldn't do anything else.
He was just laying there.
- It's pretty bad.
- [Dr. Kurpad] So, Lucas has a spinal cord injury
in the cervical spine so this is a bruise that he has.
The portion of the spinal cord that's bruised
is not really dead but actually dormant.
- They said that he qualified
for a stem cell clinical trial.
It's a experimental surgery.
- With regard to using embryonic stem cells
for treatment in general, I can see both sides
of the social argument.
But here I'm a scientist.
You sort of take an oath to do the best for your patients.
Embryonic stem cells are derived from human embryos.
These cells were genetically modified
so that they could only become cells of the nervous system.
When you put these stem cells into the injured spinal cord,
they find the ailing nerve cells
and they insulate them again
so that they can function normally.
This is an extremely rare operation
and Lucas was the third individual in the world
that received the 10 million cells in his spinal cord.
- [Dave] The thing that scared us the most
was to perform this surgery, they had to stop his breathing
for two minutes.
- The spinal cord never sits at the same spot.
You don't want the needle to go back and forth.
Sometimes what we do is we give the patient 100% oxygen
so they don't need to breath for those three minutes.
It's something that I was doing that I couldn't take back.
That would make anyone nervous.
I can tell you this, there's not a single patient
that I've met who was a new quadriplegic
that is not willing to try absolutely anything
to get back to feeling human again.
We're in this line of work to make lives better for people.
It turns out it actually worked.
- He started getting some fingers back.
Every night we went there, he would show us something new.
And this is just the beginning.
- Good one.
You put something into that one, that was good.
- I've went from not being able to eat
to cooking any meal that I want myself,
not being able to dress myself,
almost completely dress myself,
from not doing what I want, to doing what I want,
which is huge.
- I'm living with him.
I'm watching a miracle.
Every week there's a little bit more.
We haven't stopped improving yet.
- This is just a stepping stone.
There's other places to go from here.
But, this is a major milestone.
- You always want to see something that's experimental
become standard of care.
It would be great to see a paralyzed person walk
and discuss when they may be able to return to work
like nothing ever happened.
This is the significance of what these findings are.
This is a paradigm shift.
I think that this is clearly the single biggest advancement
for spinal cord injury treatment in the last 30 years,
for that matter, the last two millions years.