On December 5, 2011, Andrew Meas wiggled his toes for the first time since a motorcycle accident four years earlier paralyzed him from the chest down. Within a week, he was beginning to stand. Meas's remarkable (albeit partial) recovery comes courtesy of a groundbreaking use of an electrode array implanted over his spinal cord. 

For decades, researchers have been seeking ways to help the millions of people with spinal cord injuries regain control of their limbs, with frustratingly little success. The new device provides a rare glimmer of hope. Scientists at the University of Louisville's Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Center, where Meas and three other patients received their im­plants, speculate that the stimu­lation may be reawakening connections between the brain and the body. "There's residual circuitry that we can recover that no one realized was possible to do," says Reggie Edgerton, director of the Neuromuscular Research Laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles. "We were shocked."