Christopher Reeve’s will and determination should be an inspiration to disabled people and cryonicists alike. For the disabled, it’s the improvments in his spinal cord injury since his accident that have confounded medical experts, for cryonicists, it’s the knowledge that medical professsionals are a long way from fully knowing the true damage done by freezing and warm ischemia.

It has been eight years since Christopher Reeve broke his neck at an equestrian competition in Culpepper, Virginia. After his horse stopped suddenly before an obstacle, Reeve flipped forward and suffered what doctor’s call a "hangmans injury." Death by hanging often results from suffocation. After the accident Reeve was heard to say "I can’t breathe."

Reeve’s injury left him paralyzed from the shoulders down. He was unable to breathe on his own. Doctors immediately placed him on a ventilator. He was informed that his injury was permanent, and that he would no longer feel sensation in ninety percent of his body. Reeve stated "I was told from the start that it was hopeless, that it was impossible for me to regain movement below the shoulders."

He said that "every scientist should remove the word ‘impossible’ from his lexicon." Not only does Reeve want to cure himself, he is determined to transform medical research which he feels is constrained by excessive caution. "Research should not be reckless, but it should be fearless. If you don’t add courage to the equation, the scientific aspect will go to waste."

Up to now, Reeve’s progress has been remarkable. He’s able to use the biceps of his right arm against resistance. When in a swimming pool, he’s able to push himself off with his legs.

"One day I expect to get up from this wheelchair." This claim, which he’s often made in speeches has not been well received by certain scientists and advocates for the disabled. Some critics claim he’s in a state of denial, others have called him a spoiled celebrity who raises false hopes.

Charles Krauthammer, a prominent columnist, who’s also wheelchair bound and has a medical degree, wrote an angry appraisal of Reeve after the actor appeared in a TV commercial touting advances in spinal cord research.

Reeve is aware that his intention to recover has been dismissed, even denigrated. Yet he is not as naive as some of his doubters think. Reeve has a dogged intelligence, and in the past eight years he has developed a nuanced understanding of the biology of spinal-cord injury, he has learned how the scientific establishment sets priorities and conducts its research; and he has deciphered the ways that different branches of the government permit or bar innovative medical treatments.

Reeve knows that his fame gives him unique access to the media, to politicians, and to fund-raising dollars. By exploiting these resources, he has set out to change the way things are done in the clinic, the laboratory, and the government. He believes that only by causing a revolution in all three realms does he have a chance.

It is perhaps easy to view Reeve's quest as one driven by hubris; it is far from certain that he will walk again. However, the steady, incremental progress he has made is extraordinary and, to many scientists, confounding. Indeed, ,the results have been so encouraging that mainstream researchers are reconsidering the dogma that long-term paralysis is irreversible-and paralyzed patients around the world are beginning to follow Reeve's lead.

He considered suicide, but his wife Dana helped change his mind. "Chris had to make his own decision," she said. "I was very clear that I was in it for the long haul. I said, "you’re still you, and I love you. Let's give it two years, and if in that time life is too agonizing let's reevaluate."'

Nearly everything that Reeve read asserted that patients like him could not improve. He eventually discovered, how ever, that a few physicians and neuroscientists had taken a contrarian position. One was V. R. Edgerton, a neuroscientist at U.C.L.A. Edgerton had theorized in the early eighties that the spinal cord could function independently of the brain. This was at odds with the prevailing view that the spinal cord was merely a cable connecting brain and body.

"When scientists think they know how something works, it becomes difficult to get new ideas accepted," Edgerton told me. Virtually no decent scientist would study spinal-cord injury. "The dominant view was: it's a hopeless situation," he said. "Spinal-cord-injury research was considered 'the graveyard of neurobiology."

Edgerton began experimenting with cats whose spinal cords had been cut with a scalpel midway down their backs. The injured cats were placed in a harness and put on a treadmill. The idea was to make the cats mimic normal walking, to see if inducing such repetitive activity could reawaken circuits that Edgerton believed had been shut down by the injury. The experiment was a success: after using the treadmill for three to six months, most of the cats could walk again.

Werriig's experiment was inspired by the observation that when newborn babies are held upright, their toes touching the ground, they spontaneously move their feet in a stepping motion. To him, this suggested that there was an innate 'program 'within the human spinal cord for walking; perhaps this program could be retrieved, like an intact file on a damaged hard drive.

In November, at a conference in New Orleans, Reeve met with John McDonald, an ambitious spinal-cord researcher at Washington University in St. Louis. McDonald agreed to supervise his therapy, and that winter, for the first time since his accident, Reeve entered a swimming pool.

Around this time, Reeve found that he could wiggle the toes on his left foot. 'The sequence didn't make any sense," he said. 'So I thought, why shouldn’t I try everything?" In 2001, Reeve discovered that he could move his right leg slightly when lying on his back- His left leg revived next. Finally, Reeve's arms started to respond; he still can't lift them while sitting up, but his exercises in the pool are making them stronger. His workouts are now so rigorous, , that he often feels muscle burn afterward.

McDonald's association with Reeve has allowed him to create a flourishing rehabilitation institute in St. Louis. Forty patients are now undergoing treatment. McDonald recently started a pediatric program. "I credit Chris with leading me down this path, he has said.

In 2001, McDonald began studying groups of paralyzed patients. He discovered that patients who used the electrical- stimulation bike had fewer pressure sores, blood clots, and infections. "The best way to avoid skin breakdown is put two inches of muscle on your buttocks," McDonald said. "The best way to build bone density is to put radial forces on bone. The bike is the best way to do that."

Critics note that Reeve has financial resources that far exceed those of ordinary families. When asked how he pays for the team of eighteen people, from nurses to physical therapists, who regularly assist him. (His annual medical expenses exceed five hundred thou- sand dollars a year; his insurance covers two-thirds of that.)

Before the accident, Reeve explained, he was a member of three unions, and his disability benefits were unusually large, totaling some four million dollars. He also receives free equipment from manufacturers who hope to draw attention to their products; one company gave him an electrical- stimulation bike, which cost a hundred thousand dollars, for home use.

Reeve is unapologetic about mobilizing his resources to sustain his life and spur his recovery. He points out that he has worked tirelessly to encourage bold scientific research. To help ordinary families, he argues, exotic experiments need to become everyday procedures. And Reeve believes that too many researchers lack a sense of urgency.

As Reeve became acquainted with the scientific community, he grew frustrated by the widespread careerism. "Professors with tenure submit a grant application to get a little bit of money to try to have a little bit more success, which would then get them another grant and then another few years to achieve another little bit of success, but not to launch a major presumptive strike to get rid of the whole problem," he said.