Or will they? That's the "ultimate goal of my research," Rabchevsky said, though he has no illusions about the huge scientific obstacles in front of him and other neuroscientists. "Rats have a way of bouncing back that we can learn from," he said; "They have endogenous repair mechanisms that we're trying to understand." Scientists are pursuing a number of different avenues to understand this, and no one knows right now what may eventually work. "Some people have told Christopher Reeve [the actor] that he'll walk again. Personally I'm a skeptic," Rabchevsky admitted. "I don't give up hope, but I'm not holding my breath."

Instead of holding his breath, Rabchevsky is diligently plugging away at the basic research that will help us to better understand, and perhaps treat, spinal cord injury. Unlike most of his scientific peers, however, he has more at stake than simply professional interest. In August of 1985, right before he was to begin his junior year at Hampden-Sydney (and vie for a strong safety position on the football team), Rabchevsky was involved in a motorcycle accident that left him a paraplegic. "It happened and all of a sudden your whole life is changed," he recalled, "It was both a humbling experience and a kick in the ass." When he was in the hospital and realized he might never walk again, he read about spinal cord injury research and found a rigid dogma about the bleak prospects for recovery or regeneration.

To Rabchevsky, this seemed like a challenge: "I thought, 'Why isn't there a cure? If this damage is indeed irreversible, I want to be one of the people deciding that'."

When he returned to Hampden-Sydney, Rabchevsky put enormous pressure on himself to succeed: "I wanted to prove that I didn't need anybody's pity." He credits numerous people, including Lewis and Nell Drew, Bill Shear, and Bob Rogers with helping him at crucial junctures and making sure that he graduated only a semester behind the rest of his class.

Rabchevsky, however, is reluctant to see his life story in sentimental, movie-of-the-week terms. To him, the accident is a fact that happened 16 years ago and which has been part of his life ever since. "At some point," he said, "I adopted the DWI principle: 'deal with it'." He may have physical limitations, but he does not let them limit what he does or where he goes: "Wherever your wheels can go, your hands must go. It just depends on how intrepid you are."

The way he dealt with it was to earn a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Florida. He then completed a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Paris. Living for two years in France had its own challenges, including less awareness of disability issues: "I never saw anyone else in a wheelchair," he recalled. After France, Rabchevsky and his wife Gisele moved to Lexington, where he is now a Research Associate in the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging at the University of Kentucky. He is now negotiating for an assistant professorship in the Spinal Cord and Brain Injury Research Center there, as well for positions in several other institutes with strong spinal cord injury research programs.

There are several key avenues of spinal cord injury research and Rabchevsky is involved in three of them. He is studying how basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) therapy enhances functional recovery after acute spinal cord injury in the rat. A drug called methylprednisolone is currently the standard acute treatment for all human spinal cord injuries (Rabchevsky himself did not receive it at the time of his injury). He is now publishing a paper demonstrating that it "shows absolutely no benefits by itself at the dosages being used." Not one to shy away from controversy, he admits, "I may raise a few eyebrows with this report."

Sasha Rabchevsky in his neurology lab, with some of his promisingly self-regenerative rats.

In what he calls "an entirely different approach," Rabchevsky recently received a grant from the International Spinal Research Trust, based in London, to study autonomic dysreflexia, a condition frequently suffered by people with spinal cord injury, including him. Characterized as "a panic phase," the body reacts dramatically, often with episodic hypertension, to something going wrong below the level of injury, something possibly as simple as an ingrown toenail or sitting on a tack. In essence, Rabchevsky said, it consists of "reflex loops that go haywire." The death of NFL star Derrick Thomas two years ago is thought to have stemmed from a dysreflexic heart attack suffered while being transferred from a bed to a chair, following standard treatment for his paralysis caused by an auto accident. His perfectly healthy heart failed from the sudden overload of his sensory system. "I'm going to be using adenovirus gene therapy to prevent the abnormal nerve sprouting in the injured spinal cord that leads to this condition," Rabchevsky said. "This will help us understand the mechanisms of natural spontaneous regeneration, and will add a piece of the puzzle of promoting regeneration."

Transplantation of microglial cells into the injured spinal cord is the third focus of Rabchevsky's research. Based on his findings, he believes they actively contribute to regeneration, whereas the conventional wisdom says they act primarily to inhibit growth. By studying the glial cells around the injury site, he hopes to develop an effective means of encouraging spinal nerve cell regeneration. At this point, he said, "regeneration is possible but we do not know how to direct it to the desired targets."

In addition to all his time in the lab, Rabchevsky also has had to learn how to play the game of scientific funding. "The art of grantsmanship is crucial," he said. "And I credit the Hampden-Sydney rhetoric program for much of my success. Unfortunately, it's often the sexy science, not necessarily the good science, that gets funded." His studies on bFGF therapy are directly supported by the Kentucky Spinal Cord and Head Injury Research Trust (KSCHIRT), a state fund that collects 10% of all speeding and drunk driving tickets, acknowledging that most spinal cord injuries are the result of motor vehicle accidents.

Ultimately, Rabchevsky believes that any successful treatment will be combinational therapy, most likely using growth factors and transplantation of certain stem cells or glial cells. "There will be no magic bullet," he said. Going from paralysis to a full range of motion may be overly optimistic. "If the ultimate goal is functional recovery," he asked, "how do you measure that? How about getting two or three levels of functional recovery back? Walking is a tall order. It will be like a baby learning to walk all over again, but with a fundamentally different complement of neural circuitry." Despite his apparent scientific skepticism, Rabchevsky will keep working on a treatment, step by step. "This is an exciting time," he said, "and while I may not benefit from my own research, I hope it will eventually help others afflicted by spinal cord injury."