Neuroscientist Treating Spinal Cord Injuries
As a child, she thought she would become an artist. Despite attending a little-known college, she became recognized as the top neuroscientist in the world for her discoveries in treating spinal injuries.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
Mary Barlett Bunge (MBB) was born in New Haven, Connecticut. Her parents renovated houses, while her mother was also a painter.
CHILDHOOD
Since MBBs mother could trace her family history to include a famous British portrait painter (Joshua Reynolds), MBB believed that she would grow up to be an artist herself. But her summers spent exploring the woods and streams of rural Connecticut convinced her to pursue a career in science instead.
EDUCATION
MBB attended Simmons College in Boston, where she studied to be a laboratory technician and graduated with a degree in biology. She proved to be a phenomenal student and in her senior year, she received an offer to join a research laboratory as a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin’s medical school, earning her Ph.D. in zoology and cytology.
ONE WOMAN’S CAREER PATH IN SCIENCE
Dr. MBB’s focus for much of her career was on myelin, a mix of proteins and fatty acids that coats nerve fibers, protecting them and boosting the speed at which they conduct electric-like signals within the human body.
Early in her career, MBB and her husband, whom she met as a graduate student (who became an M.D.), used new electron microscopes to describe the way that myelin developed around nerve fibers and how, after significant injury or illness, it receded, in a process called demyelination.
Treating spinal-cord injuries is one of the most frustrating corners of medical research. Each year, thousands of people are left partially or fully paralyzed after automobile accidents, falls, sports injuries and gun violence. Unlike other parts of the body, the spinal cord is stubbornly difficult to rehabilitate.
Through their research, MBB and her husband concluded that demyelination was one reason spinal-cord injuries have been so difficult for the body to repair – an insight that in turn opened doors to the possibility of reversing it through treatments.
Through decades of working together, MBB and her husband determined that myelin could be encouraged to regrow if the affected area was coated in transplanted ‘Schwann cells” which typically surround axons in the nervous system and specialize in producing the proteins. They found promising potential in experiments that placed transplanted human Schwann cells in rats.
The two split their work. MBB focused on the basic research while her husband worked on its possible applications. After he died, MBB continued to work on the implications of their work for spinal-cord therapy.
MBB realized that simply transplanting Schwann cells was not enough; drugs and other interventions were needed to promote regeneration. In 2003, she and her research team announced that after using a combination of medications and transplanted cells, rats achieved 70 percent of their previous mobility after just 12 weeks.
CAREER SATISFACTION
MBB’s work in cellular transplantation revolutionized the field of spinal-cord treatment, said Dr. Barth Green, a neurosurgeon and co-founder and dean at the ‘Miami Project to Cure Paralysis’, a nonprofit research organization, with which MBB was affiliated.
“She definitely was the top woman in neuroscience, not just in the United States, but in the world,” said Dr. Green, who added that “She started the ball rolling and now everyone all over the world is into cell transplants. There’s no doubt people stopped breathing when she entered a room because they were so much in awe of what she had done.”
(This career story is based on an obituary written by Clay Risen, published by the New York Times newspaper on March 6, 2024.)
