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Our nervous system is made up of axons which carries the nerve impulses. In a spinal injury those axons are cut or crushed and they die. So thay stop carrying those impulses and messages don't get transmitted from the brain to the other parts of the body. Now you hear that nerves don't regenerate. That's not completely true. Our peripheral nervous system--like our arms and legs--damaged axons can grow back. But in the central nervous system--the brain and the spinal cord--they don't. At least they don't grow on their own. So when you cut your finger, when the skin grows back you regain your sense of touch. In the spinal cord that doesn't happen. But there are things that we are learning that can regrow them. We attack SCI on all fronts. We use traditional decompression surgury to reconstruct the bony structure of the vertebrae themselves and to protect the site where your injury occured. Then we graft two things into the site of the injury occured: one is some of the patient's own peripheral nervous system tissue and the other substance we use is some embryonic central nervous system cells(which are taken from sharks as they are more smilar to humans then other animals.