PLASTIC nerves may one day help people with spinal injuries get back on their feet. Scientists claim to have taken a step in the right direction with thin plastic films designed to behave like nerve-cell membranes, which they say could eventually form part of an artificial nerve.
The goal, says Lindsay Bashford at St George’s Hospital Medical School in Tooting, was to make a material capable of mimicking the electrochemical reactions that nerves use to convey signals.
In nerve cells, waves of sodium and potassium ions cross the cell membrane in opposite directions in response to electrical signals passing along…
