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Motor neurons are large, long-lived nerve cells that are essential to our ability to move. Much has been learned over the past century about these ancient neurons, present in both vertebrates and invertebrates, but much more still remains to be discovered about them.

For three decades, my laboratory focused its attention upon these elegant cells, trying to understand aspects of the structure and chemistry of normal, injured and diseased spinal motor neurons. This document is a distillation of our published and unpublished experimental findings and of my thoughts about motor neurons. It is presented as a series of questions I have asked about these cells and our attempts to answer them. It is my hope that this information will be useful to anyone curious about normal, injured or diseased motor neurons, including both scientists and non-scientists. In addition, others interested in the ideas and work of the faculty at this university may find something of value in these pages.

This is a survey of my own work on motor neurons. It is not meant to be a comprehensive review of these cells. Rather, it represents my data and personal views about the structure and chemistry of motor neurons, gained from my own experiences studying them. It contains only a few citations to the work of other laboratories. It is not written in the traditional style of a scientific paper, but is a less formal set of experimental observations and reflections, made much more personal, reflective and accessible through the medium of the Internet than is currently possible through conventional means of scientific publishing.

There are three major reasons for presenting this information in this form:

  • It provides me with a way to synthesize and make more coherent research I have published serially over three decades. It is an attempt to provide in one place a description of my laboratory’s contributions to motor neuron research. My studies on motor neurons have been published piecemeal over an extended period of time. I would be astonished if even those who do research on motor neurons could adequately summarize most of the findings of a laboratory other than their own. I believe that such a summary could be helpful to them and to others.
  • This document also offers me an opportunity to disclose unpublished observations that have accumulated over the years. Those observations, though incomplete and requiring more critical judgment by the reader, may still be of some use to someone. They were often left unpublished because they represented negative or positive results that would have required much more study and effort to bring them to publication in the usual way.
  • Finally, this repository provides me with a place to leave my reflections, speculations and predictions about motor neurons. Free from most of the editorial constraints of the scientific publishing industry, it permits me to speak as freely, but cautiously, as I do in the classroom.

In the three major sections below, I summarize the questions I have asked about normal, injured and diseased spinal motor neurons and the progress my colleagues*and I made towards their answers. I try to make clear why particular issues were raised and how I evaluate what was learned about them. The issues and the publications in which they are addressed are not presented chronologically. What we learned about some of the issues sometimes appeared in several different studies, and this document assembles those separate findings into a much more complete response to the questions that engendered them. For a more detailed accounting of the evidence related to each question, follow the links provided to published papers and to unpublished experimental data.

*A number of pre- and postdoctoral students and several faculty members directly contributed to the studies on spinal motor neurons described here. Those who worked in or closely with my laboratory and to whom I am particularly indebted are:

The late Ms. Victoria Hoke, Research Technician to the lab for 25 years, Dr. Paul Farel, the late Dr. David Weil, Dr. Patsy Capps-Covey, Dr. Seth Hetherington, Ms. Susan Hester, Ms. Anahid Kavookjian, Dr. Ted Busby, Dr. Dominick Sinicropi, Dr. Tom Brock, Dr. Kathy Michels, Mr. Benjamin Aycock, Dr. Katherine Kirby Dunleavy, Dr. Ravi Avva, Dr. Drew Monitto, Dr. Cindy Leech, Dr.Takao Hashimoto, Dr. Stephen Burgess, Dr. Shoko Sato, Dr. Bruce Rudisch, Dr. Jason Katz, Dr. Lorraine Cornwell, Dr. Lihong Chen, Mr. Quentin Reid, Dr. Kay Lund, and Mr. Randy Fuller.

In addition, I am especially grateful to my departmental chairmen – the late Dr. Edward Perl, Dr. Stan Froehner and Dr. James Anderson – for their support of this research, to Ms. Annie Schilling, the late Norma Poe, and all the administrative staff of the department, and to a number of individuals who have generously shared their knowledge and interest in motor neurons with me over the years: the late Dr. Masanori Tomonaga in whose laboratory I worked at the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology in 1982-1983; The late Dr. Motoy Kuno, Dr. Yuhei Miyata, Dr. Neal Weakly, Dr. Seiitsu Ono, Dr. Mitsuo Yamauchi and Dr. Surindar Cheema. Special gratitude is owed to each of the ALS patient donors studied in this work and to their families. In the development of this website, I gratefully acknowledge the support and advice of Mr. Paul Jones, Dr. Helen Tibbo, Ms. Megan Winget Barrett, Ms. Claudia Condrey, Mr. David Kinton, Ms. Jan McCormick and Ms. Adriana Tavernise.