Thursday, January 28, 2016


Scientists Move Closer to Understanding Schizophrenia’s Cause

By BENEDICT CAREY NY TIMES


Scientists reported on Wednesday that they had taken a significant step toward understanding the cause of schizophrenia, in a landmark study that provides the first rigorously tested insight into the biology behind any common psychiatric disorder.

More than two million Americans have a diagnosis of schizophrenia, which is characterized by delusional thinking and hallucinations. The drugs available to treat it blunt some of its symptoms but do not touch the underlying cause.

The finding, published in the journal Nature, will not lead to new treatments soon, experts said, nor to widely available testing for individual risk. But the results provide researchers with their first biological handle on an ancient disorder whose cause has confounded modern science for generations. The finding also helps explain some other mysteries, including why the disorder often begins in adolescence or young adulthood.

“They did a phenomenal job,” said David B. Goldstein, a professor of genetics at Columbia University who has been critical of previous large-scale projects focused on the genetics of psychiatric disorders. “This paper gives us a foothold, something we can work on, and that’s what we’ve been looking for now, for a long, long time.”
Steven McCarroll, an associate professor of genetics at Harvard, and Beth Stevens, an assistant professor of neurology at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard. The results of their study have provided researchers with their first biological handle on schizophrenia. Credit Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times
The researchers pieced together the steps by which genes can increase a person’s risk of developing schizophrenia. That risk, they found, is tied to a natural process called synaptic pruning, in which the brain sheds weak or redundant connections between neurons as it matures. During adolescence and early adulthood, this activity takes place primarily in the section of the brain where thinking and planning skills are centered, known as the prefrontal cortex. People who carry genes that accelerate or intensify that pruning are at higher risk of developing schizophrenia than those who do not, the new study suggests.

Some researchers had suspected that the pruning must somehow go awry in people with schizophrenia, because previous studies showed that their prefrontal areas tended to have a diminished number of neural connections, compared with those of unaffected people. The new paper not only strongly supports that this is the case, but also describes how the pruning probably goes wrong and why, and identifies the genes responsible: People with schizophrenia have a gene variant that apparently facilitates aggressive “tagging” of connections for pruning, in effect accelerating the process.

Some scientists warned that the history of biological psychiatry stands as a caution against premature optimism. “This work is extremely persuasive,” said Dr. Samuel Barondes, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, “but any step forward is not only rare and unusual, it’s just one step in a journey of a thousand miles” to improved treatments.

The study, by scientists from Harvard Medical School, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Broad Institute, a research center allied with Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, provides a showcase of biomedical investigation at its highest level. The research team began by focusing on a location on the human genome, the MHC, which was most strongly associated with schizophrenia in previous genetic studies. On a bar graph — called a Manhattan plot because it looks like a cluster of skyscrapers — the MHC looms highest.

“The MHC is the Freedom Tower” of the Manhattan plot, said Eric S. Lander, the director of the Broad Institute. “The question was, what’s in there?”

The area is a notoriously dark warren in the genome known to contain genes that facilitate the body’s immune response, for example, by flagging invading bacteria to be destroyed. That property had given rise to speculation that schizophrenia might be a kind of autoimmune condition, in which the body attacked its own cells.

But the research team, led by Steven McCarroll, an associate professor of genetics at Harvard, and by Aswin Sekar, one of his graduate students, found something different. Using advanced statistical methods, the team found that the MHC locus contained four common variants of a gene called C4, and that those variants produced two kinds of proteins, C4-A and C4-B.
The team analyzed the genomes of more than 64,000 people and found that people with schizophrenia were more likely to have the overactive forms of C4-A than control subjects. “C4-A seemed to be the gene driving risk for schizophrenia,” Dr. McCarroll said, “but we had to be sure.”

The researchers turned to Beth Stevens, an assistant professor of neurology at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard, who was an author of a 2007 study showing that the products of MHC genes were involved in synaptic pruning in normal developing brains. But how important was this C4 protein, exactly? Very important, it turned out: Mice bred without the genes that produce C4 showed clear signs that their synaptic pruning had gone awry, Dr. Stevens’s lab found.

Taken together, Dr. Stevens said in an interview, “the evidence strongly suggested that too much C4-A leads to inappropriate pruning during this critical phase of development.”

In particular, the authors concluded, too much C4-A could mean too much pruning — which would explain not only the thinner prefrontal layers in schizophrenia, but also the reason that the disorder most often shows itself in people’s teenage years or early twenties. “The finding connects all these dots, all these disconnected observations about schizophrenia, and makes them make sense,” Dr. McCarroll said.

Carrying a gene variant that facilitates aggressive pruning is hardly enough to cause schizophrenia; far too many other factors are at work. Having such a variant, Dr. McCarroll estimates, would increase a person’s risk by about 25 percent over the 1 percent base rate of schizophrenia — that is, to 1.25 percent. That is not nearly enough to justify testing in the general population, even if further research confirms the new findings and clarifies the roles of other associated genes.

Yet the equation changes when it comes to young people who are at very high risk of developing the disorder, because they are showing early signs — a sudden slippage in mental acuity and memory, or even internal “voices” that seem oddly real. This ominous period may last a year or more, and often does not lead to full-blown schizophrenia. The researchers hope that the at-risk genetic profile, once it has been fleshed out more completely, will lead to the discovery of biomarkers that could help clarify a prognosis in these people.

Developing a drug to slow or modulate pruning poses another kind of challenge. If the new study shows anything, it is that synaptic pruning is a delicate, exquisitely timed process, and that it is still poorly understood. The team does not yet know, for example, why C4-A leads to a different rate or kind of pruning than C4-B. Any medication that tampered with that system would be a risky proposition, the authors and outside experts agreed.

“We’re all very excited and proud of this work,” Dr. Lander said. “But I’m not ready to call it a victory until we have something that can help patients.”

Sunday, January 24, 2016

Litvinenko’s murder shows why Putin’s Russia will never prosper

Will Hutton The Guardian (London)

Sir Robert Owen’s languid upper-class vowels and baggy London clubland suit don’t capture the indefatigable essence of the man. He represents the best of the British tradition of the rule of law. His report into the circumstances of the death of Alexander Litvinenko released last week is a classic of the genre – scrupulously evidence-based, impartial and judicious. It is what a rule-of-law society should produce.

Litvinenko, Owen judged, was murdered in London by the Russian government because, as an ex-KGB agent, and later of FSB (the KGB’s successor), he had become an influential, vocal and effective opponent of a profoundly corrupt state security structure. A book by Litvinenko – Lubyanka Criminal Group – presented evidence that the Russian security service is deeply entwined with organised crime, both in Russia and elsewhere in Europe, including with the mafia. In a second, if less convincing, book he claimed that the Russian services colluded in blowing up apartment blocks and blamed Chechen terrorists.

After fleeing Russia in 2000, Litvinenko had gone on to help not just Britain’s MI6, but the Spanish and Italian security services in unmasking FSB involvement in criminal activity.

But it was only after Russia’s passing of the 2006 Extremism Law, justifying extra-territorial killings of Russians making allegedly libellous statements about the government, that Vladimir Putin was able to hit back at a man who, days before he was poisoned, had accused him of being both a paedophile and the man behind the assassination of the journalist Anna Politkovskya.

Owen is judicious. The polonium-210 that poisoned Litvinenko could only come from a state nuclear reactor and could only be given to the FSB with the go-ahead of Putin or his circle.So strong is the back-covering culture within the FSB that the director would only give the go-ahead for his arms-length operatives to kill Litvinenko with Putin’s backing. The need to get rid of Litvinenko was acute. But unable to interview either of the two men who travelled to London allegedly to murder their quarry, Owen can arrive at only a qualified conclusion: “The FSB operation to kill Mr Litvinenko was probably approved by… President Putin.”

The events are horrifying enough – any Londoner could have been harmed – but perhaps even more telling is the window it provides into today’s Russia. This is a world of routine contract killings, always deniable because they are delivered at arm’s length, by a state security service intertwined with clandestine gangsters.

The KGB was the security wing of the Soviet Communist party. The FSB is Putin’s personalised security wing. Its job is to wreck the reputations – and even kill – all those who challenge the regime. Not even China mandates the killing of its nationals anywhere in the world if they say something that President Xi Jinping considers libellous. This is the law not even of a communist dictatorship, but of a tsar. The reaction to Litvinenko’s death in Moscow was carelessly gleeful: a traitor had received his just comeuppance.

Mainstream Toryism … is more Putinesque that it cares to admit and our civil society can be as vulnerable as Russia’s
Owen’s brief biographies of the key actors in the drama are also telling; they are fierce Russian nationalists passionate to avenge what they portray as cumulative slights from the west. Concepts such as the rule of law, checked and balanced government, democracy and an autonomous, self-governing civil society are western viruses that will only contaminate the homeland and its capacity to do what it needs to extend Russia’s proper place in the world. In this climate, the FSB works with any tool to hand.

The rule of law – impartial judgments that can be referred to independent higher courts based on the balance of evidence around clear jurisprudential principles and deliberatively legislated democratic law – is the cornerstone not merely of liberty, but of prosperity and our civilisation. Britain is blessed because it is a rule-of-law society. Russia, for all its military power and abundant resources, is damned because it is not.
The growing evidence is that economies such as Russia’s or China’s can use command-and-control mechanisms to grow into middle-income per head countries. But to become high-income per capita countries is infinitely harder. All the energies of civil society and workforces have to be harnessed to create great self-standing organisations. These, by developing their own purpose and cultures, can marshal the immense amounts of information that are at the core of the modern economy – and then produce at scale.

Russia can use command-and-control economics to create a Gazprom. It can never create a Google, an Apple, a BBC, a Siemens or even the Anglo-Saxon rock’n’roll culture. For that, it would need the rule of law and all the open democratic structures that support it.
Yet, we can’t be complacent: current British political culture is very feeble on the rule of law. There was a Litvinenko inquiry only because the government lost a high court case opposing it, fearing the international ramifications (giving offence to Russia). Its response has been beneath feeble. But then with honourable exceptions – Michael Gove, Dominic Grieve, Ken Clarke – today’s mainstream conservatism is more interested in entrenching permanent Tory dominance of the House of Common than in acknowledging the crucial role of checks and balances in upholding a rule-of-law society.

It will neuter the second chamber, write European courts out of any role in the British legal system, gerrymander the number of seats in the Commons, make Scottish MPs second class and emasculate the BBC. In its aims to Torify Britain, it is more Putinesque that it cares to acknowledge – and British civil society can be vulnerable just like Russia’s.

Meanwhile, Labour has no firmer grip – New Labour flouted international law to invade Iraq and its Corbynite successors share a Putinesque worldview that the pernicious west is the source of all evil. For Corbyn, the rule of law is an ideological concept, the handmaiden of capitalism, and liberation movements worldwide are right to distrust it in their struggle against western imperialism or its surrogates. To possess military power capable of defending us and other rule-of law societies is wrong as a matter of principle. Putin’s gangsters and contract killers can be trusted never to threaten us; Trident is an expensive bauble.

Alexander Litvinenko, dying in agony, left a last letter cursing Putin and declaring his pride in becoming a British citizen – because of what Britain stands for. Sir Robert Owen has done more than uncover the truth. He has offered a fierce reminder of the importance of the rule of law. Let’s hope it is heeded across our political culture.

Thursday, January 21, 2016

Annals of Medicine: One Small Step

A paraplegic undergoes pioneering surgery.


BY D. T. MAX
The New Yorker

In 2012, Darek Fidyka underwent surgery in which cells from his olfactory nerve were inserted into his damaged spinal cord.
When a spinal cord is damaged, location is destiny: the higher the injury, the more severe the effects. The spine has thirty-three vertebrae, which are divided into five regions—the coccygeal, the sacral, the lumbar, the thoracic, and the cervical. The nerve-rich cord traverses nearly the entire length of the spine. The nerves at the bottom of the cord are well buried, and sometimes you can walk away from damage to these areas. In between are insults to the long middle region of the spine, which begins at the shoulders and ends at the midriff. These are the thoracic injuries. Although they don’t affect the upper body, they can still take away the ability to walk or feel below the waist, including autonomic function (bowel, bladder, and sexual control). Injuries to the cord in the cervical area—what is called “breaking your neck”—can be lethal or leave you paralyzed and unable to breathe without a ventilator.

Doctors who treat spinal-cord-injury patients use a letter-and-number combination to identify the site of the damage. They talk of C3s (the cord as it passes through the third cervical vertebra) or T8s (the eighth thoracic vertebra). These morbid bingo-like codes help doctors instantly gauge the severity of a patient’s injury.

Darek Fidyka, who is forty-one years old, is a T9. He was born and raised in Pradzew, a small farming town in central Poland, not far from Lodz. At 3 A.M. on July 27, 2010, Fidyka and his girlfriend, Justyna, woke up to the sound of someone smashing Fidyka’s Volkswagen outside their house, a few miles from Pradzew. They got out of bed, rushed out the door, and found her ex-husband, Jaroslaw, battering the car with a cinder block. They were not completely shocked. The three of them had been friends since their teen years—Fidyka had gone to Justyna and Jaroslaw’s wedding—but Jaroslaw eventually became a heavy drinker. He started beating Justyna, and then went to prison for it. Justyna obtained an order of protection, and eventually took up with Darek. He moved into her house. “Our earlier relationships hadn’t worked out, so we decided to give it a try,” Fidyka recalls. But Jaroslaw, paranoid, believed that his two friends had begun a relationship while he and Justyna were still married.

Outside the house, Fidyka and Justyna tried to calm Jaroslaw down. Though Fidyka was tall and athletic—he was a contractor and a volunteer fireman—Jaroslaw pounced on him. “I didn’t expect him to have a knife,” Fidyka says. Jaroslaw stabbed him eighteen times. Several of the wounds punctured his lungs, and one nearly cut his spinal cord in half.

As Fidyka lay on the ground, he felt his body change. “I can remember very vividly losing feeling in my legs, bit by bit,” he says. “It started in the upper part of the spine and was moving down slowly while I lay waiting for the ambulance to arrive.” He adds, “I was aware of everything. I could feel my strength leaking out with every thrust.”

Jaroslaw dropped his weapon and ran away. He hanged himself shortly afterward, in a nearby orchard.

Today, Fidyka lives at Akson, a rehabilitation facility in Wrocław, a city in western Poland. The attack left him paralyzed from the waist down. The Akson facility is affiliated with the city’s university hospital—Wrocław is the former German city of Breslau, long a place of medical excellence—and occupies a two-story building on the town’s outskirts. The long, low structure, a former Hare Krishna center, was built on open land, but it is being walled in as Poland prospers and new buildings are constructed. Fidyka lives in a narrow room on the second floor. He has a laptop and a few books; the only picture on the wall is of Pope John Paul II. Justyna left him six months after the knifing.

On the day I visited, there was a bowl of clementines that his mother, who lives in Pradzew, had brought for him. Many nights, she sleeps there, in a bed on the other side of the room. Her scuffs are lined up next to his sneakers, which are eerily spotless.

Fidyka spends much of his time downstairs in an exercise room, trying to gain back his lost strength. I watched him there one sunlit morning this past spring, as a physical therapist helped him stretch. Cramping and spasms are a problem for the paralyzed, and a large part of what therapists do for them is provide artificial impetus to muscles that are meant to be in motion. Fidyka lay near two female patients: a C6-C8, who had been paralyzed from the waist down after a car crash, and a T5-T8, whose spine had been damaged during an operation for a tumor. Fidyka was lying face down on a gym mat; the therapist was sitting on him, on a cushion, and pulling up on his back. Physical therapy is not meant to be watched. It is intimate and awkward, the gap between the well and the diminished underscored at every moment.

Fidyka looked very tired. A cold had sapped his energy, and it was a Friday. When you do physical therapy eight hours a day, five days a week, it is as hard as athletics. On weekends, when Fidyka and his mother go home to Pradzew, about a hundred miles away, he is depleted.

People with a damaged spinal cord can get better without interventions. In the first few months, it is not unusual for a patient, especially one with partial spinal-cord damage, to regain some strength or sensation in the legs, or some bowel control or sexual function. But after this period the likelihood of improvement drops off radically. Scar tissue covers the wound, and even nerves that were initially unscathed die, leaving the body less able to renew or rewire damaged nerve circuits. According to Steven Kirshblum, a medical director at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation, in New Jersey, after a year fewer than two per cent of patients with a complete spinal-cord injury show significant motor recovery. Each year that follows shuts the door a bit more firmly. At the time of my visit to the Wrocław facility, the T5-T8 still had a chance of improving—the botched tumor operation had taken place only nine months earlier—but it had been seven years since the car accident that left the C6-C8 unable to walk. For her, physical therapy was maintenance and precautionary—for flexibility and over-all health, and to avoid bedsores.
At first, Fidyka appeared to be on the same path as the C6-C8. After he was assaulted, an ambulance took him to an emergency room in the county capital of Bełchatów, where he lay in a coma for three days. “My family and friends told me that it was touch and go,” he remembers. When he awoke, his first response was joy at being alive. At the time, his sister, Wioletta, was pregnant, and the stress caused by his injury sent her into labor; while he was unconscious, a niece had been born. Upon waking up, he called Wioletta. “This is the first time for her,” he said, of the baby. “The second for me. I’ve received a second life from God.”

He assumed that he could still walk, and when he found that he couldn’t get out of bed he wasn’t worried: he figured that he’d walk soon. He loved to hunt, and expected to be back in the woods outside Pradzew before long.

After a month of basic physical therapy, in Bełchatów, he was transferred to another facility. Physical therapy can help new spinal-cord-injury patients recover function—the body relearns by doing—but after six months Fidyka had regained no strength or feeling. By that point, his public benefits had run out, but his family had friends in Lodz, and he spent six weeks at the university hospital there. It didn’t help. In March, 2011, Fidyka was discharged—incontinent, impotent, and without sensation or strength in his legs—to go on with his life as best he could. He had been a busy general contractor who dabbled in interior design, and in Pradzew he had been a charismatic and well-liked figure. Now, on returning home, he says, he was too depressed even to watch TV. “I didn’t know what to do with myself,” he remembers. “I was empty inside.”

The man I met at Akson was no longer demoralized. Fidyka shook my hand with exaggerated vigor, like a salesman. He wore a T-shirt and sweatpants, and his blue eyes twinkled. When I asked him why he was always chewing gum, he joked that he’d been told to exercise all his muscles. His custom-built red wheelchair has a seat-back cushion with an image of a stallion rearing from a wheelchair; as he rolled himself up and down the halls of Akson, his jaws working fervently, you felt that the same image was in his head. The other patients in the facility seemed beaten down by the irreversibility of their situation, but Fidyka projected an intense, if trammelled, physicality.

After the back-stretching exercises, the physical therapist began pulling up his lower legs. Fidyka, who is six feet tall and weighed a hundred and seventy-two pounds before his injury, remains muscular above the waist, and his frame is large enough so that even his paralyzed lower parts don’t seem atrophied. He grimaced as the therapist stretched his hamstrings—first the left, then the right. Fidyka closed his eyes; he buried his forehead in his fist. The two women in the room were also being stretched, but their faces showed nothing. Their relationship to their limbs seemed distant and polite, as if they were renting them.

Later, the therapist worked with Fidyka to build his strength. He lay on his back and pushed one leg out against the flat of the therapist’s hand. His quadriceps visibly tensed—making clear that he has regained some control over the muscles below his waist. This development is remarkable and has almost no counterparts in the clinical histories of people with spinal injuries. And it suggests that an operation he received at the Wrocław University Hospital, in 2012, was a success. During the procedure, surgeons removed some of the cells surrounding the nerves that run from Fidyka’s nose into his brain and injected them into the gap that the knife wound had left in his spine. Our nasal passages are exposed to a lot of abuse—from pollution to viruses—and the neurons within them die and are reborn constantly. This regrowth is managed by supporting cells, called olfactory ensheathing cells, which form tunnels that neurons thread their way through. (A 2006 article in the London Sunday Times Magazine compared the nodules to the “tiny porous canals” of a Cadbury Flake bar.) Fidyka’s doctors—guided by an idiosyncratic British researcher named Geoffrey Raisman, the head of neurological repair at the Institute of Neurology at University College London—believed that if ensheathing cells were injected into his spinal cord they would help injured neurons to cross the wound, healing his spine. The surgeons had to open his skull and take out the ensheathing cells, a five-hour-long operation, and then open up his spine and put them back in—another five hours. Before Fidyka, no animal more complex than a rat had been subjected to the procedure, which was risky. Yet the gamble appears to be paying off.

As soon as Fidyka had healed from the operation, he began an intensive course of physical therapy. A few months later, there were small signs of muscle activity in his left leg. Soon, he could feel pinpricks in his right. “Sometimes, when I was shifting into or from the wheelchair and I knocked my legs against something, there was this new sensation,” Fidyka remembers. When his right thigh began to ache, he discovered a bedsore that had been there for months. Electrical-muscular studies and M.R.I. scans suggest that neurons in Fidyka’s spinal cord above and below the wound have sprouted extensions again; some may even have crossed the half-inch wound to reconnect with one another.

Upon detecting such signs of progress, Fidyka’s medical team was not stinting in its self-congratulations. The results of the operation, Raisman said in a 2014 BBC documentary, were “more impressive than a man walking on the moon.” He called olfactory ensheathing cells “a magic carpet.” Raisman can be forgiven his pride. Olfactory ensheathing cells have shown surprising promise in healing spinal-cord injuries in a field dominated by far better-funded efforts, principally stem-cell transplants and experiments to stimulate nerve growth through drugs. So far, these two methods have not worked as well as hoped—stem cells turn out to be difficult to manipulate, and the microenvironment of spinal-cord fluid is extremely complicated. Ensheathing cells have become a surprise contender.

Fidyka is now ambulatory, with the help of high leg braces and a walking frame, and he can ride a stationary bike if he is hoisted onto it. His recovery is significant without being miraculous. “He can walk, but he’s not dancing” is how Raisman described Fidyka’s condition to me. In this world, there are no Lazarus stories. But this is a field where even small gains have eluded surgeons for decades. A 2003 book by John Russell Silver, “History of the Treatment of Spinal Injuries,” flatly declares that “the spinal cord cannot be repaired.” So if Fidyka continues to inch along the path to recovery—and if the procedure can be replicated in other patients, with comparable results—he will make medical history. He will be the first person confirmed to have had spinal paralysis reversed by an operation.
It’s not easy to hurt the central nervous system. The load of neurons in the brain is encased in bone worthy of a tank manufacturer, and the cord that transmits their commands is brilliantly defended by the vertebrae, which are set in a mesh of leathery membrane. There is little in nature that can invade this flexible redoubt. Of course, our lives are not subjected to only natural forces anymore. In the United States, roughly forty per cent of spinal-cord injuries are caused by automobile crashes, with gunshots accounting for thirteen per cent. Then there are sports accidents: flips on the trampoline, dives in the wrong end of the pool. Young people are at greatest risk—according to the Mayo Clinic, the most perilous years are between sixteen and thirty—and men are four times as likely to hurt their spines as women. The Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation reports that more than a million Americans are paralyzed as a result of spinal-cord injuries.

Detailed descriptions of spinal-cord injury date back to the first known medical document, an Egyptian papyrus from 1600 B.C., but it was not until the First World War that interest in treating it began in earnest; before then, it was as infrequent as it was devastating. Of the tens of thousands of spinal-cord-injury patients on both sides of the Great War, eighty per cent died in short order from sepsis initiated by bedsores or kidney infections, and many of the survivors died soon after. Amid so much carnage, it came as a revelation that simple protocols—always using a catheter to remove urine, turning a patient in bed every few hours—increased life expectancy dramatically.

But to what end? Those who survived were eventually sent home from the hospital with no hope of improvement. People with spinal-cord injuries have become far better integrated into society—these days, no one expects a paraplegic to just disappear, and motorized wheelchairs can now be directed by breathing into a tube or by eye movement. For many paralyzed people, disability is a challenge but not a sentence. Yet the condition remains overwhelming for others, as much for its psychological impact as for its physical restrictions. The suicide rate of Americans with spinal-cord injuries is three times higher than the average.

When we hurt, we expect to get better. If you cut your finger, the tissue grows back, and beneath the skin the nerves reknit their severed connections. Soon the finger can move and feel things again. Of all the neurons in the body, only those in the central nervous system—the ones situated in the brain and the spinal cord—seem incapable of this trick. Broken backs do not heal, and, with few exceptions, brain cells do not regenerate. Perhaps it is an artifact of biology: central-nervous-system injuries were so rare in our prehistory that there was no reason for evolution to expend energy devising strategies to fix them.

The belief that there was nothing you could do to repair a spinal injury prevailed for centuries. But in the nineteen-sixties a generation of researchers began to question this assumption, among them Geoffrey Raisman. The grandson of Lithuanian Jews who immigrated to England, he got both his undergraduate and medical degrees from Oxford University. (His father, a tailor, made the suit that he wore at his medical-school graduation, in 1965.) Raisman had planned to become a physician but found himself drawn to basic research, particularly to anatomy.

Raisman, who is seventy-six, is querulous by nature, a determined outsider. When I visited him in London, at the Institute of Neurology, in Queen Square, I found that he worked at a makeshift desk in a corridor, as if he were a graduate student. “I have no office,” he boasted. He called to a colleague, “Do you want a journalist to pester you? I have one!” He has curly brown hair that has receded to the top of his head; his voice often rises to reflect the indignities he has suffered—and the counterblows he has landed. He is a proud polymath: he told me that he has given lectures in Mandarin, and he is fond of quoting Tennyson. Raisman used to run a large lab at the National Institute for Medical Research, in London, but he found managing it a bother, and he now works with only two associates, who have been with him for decades. “Research progresses faster than when I had thirty,” he claims. He gets no government research money, and raises most of his funds from small private charities. Yet, for all his cantankerousness, he is part of the British medical-research establishment. Everyone knows Raisman, and his science—anatomy in an era of molecular biology—is grudgingly admired by many. Susan Barnett, a researcher in spinal-cord injuries at the University of Glasgow, says that Raisman’s “quirky, eccentric” manner stands out in the conservative medical world: “Geoff has this personality that he just wants to do it, and will do it regardless.”

Shortly after graduating from medical school, Raisman took his first look at a spinal cord through an electron microscope—then a novel tool in research. Viewed through a conventional microscope, he remembers, the injured parts looked still and dead—“like a forest of trees, silent in a windless sky,” as he told the Sunday Times Magazine. But with an electron microscope’s higher magnification he was surprised to see surviving neurons spilling into the area of the damage, replacing lost connections. “I suddenly could hear the leaves rustling,” he remembers. To Raisman, the images shattered the dogma that the nerves in the human body declined after infancy. The tissue was clearly attempting to recover lost function. Raisman’s work in the mid-sixties helped establish the doctrine of plasticity—he even takes credit for inventing the term. The central nervous system is not at all static; it is constantly remaking itself in response to both opportunity and insult.

Armed with this idea, Raisman began transplanting nerve cells into the damaged brains and spinal cords of rats. He had theorized that new axons—spidery extensions that carry the neuron’s impulses—would sprout enthusiastically, and this proved correct. The problem was that the axons did not find receptor cells for the electrical impulses that they were trying to relay. He came to think that researchers had misunderstood what went wrong after a spinal-cord injury: that the problem lay not with the neurons but with the pathways they had once travelled along. As he explained to me in his non-office, “Imagine the nerve fibre is a motorcar. You call it an ‘automobile,’ don’t you? Imagine it’s an automobile. They can travel only where there’s a roadway. They can’t travel across water, they can’t travel across plowed fields, they can’t travel across mountains.”
Raisman understood that he had set himself a difficult problem. The ancient Egyptian papyrus about paralysis had warned that it was “an ailment not to be treated,” and he kept a copy of this document on his office wall. But he threw himself into discovering a solution. During the seventies and eighties, he remained “hunched over a sort of periscope, peering down a little green tube,” as he wrote in an unpublished memoir, trying to answer his own question: How does a neuron’s axon find its way to its appropriate target? Neurons are only a portion of what is cumulatively called a “nerve bundle”; they carry the electric impulses that govern muscle contraction or register sensation. But neurons are surrounded by various kinds of ancillary cell, grouped under the name of glia (modern Latin for “glue”). Glial cells vastly outnumber nerve cells. When Raisman began investigating paralysis, no one knew what the glial cells did, though there were hints that their role was significant. “Einstein’s brain had an unusually high proportion of glial cells,” he points out. “Could it be a coincidence? We’d have to kill a lot of geniuses to find out.”

At the time, glial cells were considered the brain’s equivalent of junk DNA, and most neuroanatomists were not interested in them. They seemed to hold little promise in spinal-cord repair; in fact, they appeared to play a contrary role. After an injury, a chain of responses takes place in the spine: broken blood vessels swell, killing off neurons that end up squeezed within the cage of the vertebrae. Other neurons, sensing that the central nervous system has been breached, commit suicide; still others sprout new axons that struggle to reëstablish severed connections. Glial cells appear to hinder this regeneration process: they rush to create a physical barrier, sealing the spinal cord with scar tissue that neurons cannot penetrate. According to many researchers, the glial cells that form the scar are toxic to growing nerves.

But Raisman realized that there is one part of the central nervous system where glial cells encourage regeneration: in the nerves that connect the nose to the brain. The nerves of the nasal cavity regrow when they are damaged or cut, and this healing is directed by special glial cells, which usher neurons along the path from the nose membrane to the brain. When nerves in the nose die, after three months or so, new ones spring forth, allowing people to maintain the ability to smell. In the nineteen-nineties, Raisman damaged the spines of rats with a tiny needle heated at the tip, and then inserted the special glial cells—olfactory ensheathing cells—at the site of the wound, to see what would happen.

As I sat in his corridor, he showed me a short movie that he had made some years ago. It features footage of an unnamed white rat crosscut with video of his granddaughter Amy when she was about a year old. (He noted that his daughter, Ruth, wasn’t thrilled about the juxtaposition.) “Off you go, Amy,” Raisman said to the screen, clicking the play button with excitement. In the video, the toddler crawls up the stairs of her house. But it is not Amy whose crawling you are meant to be excited about; it is the rat that is climbing in subsequent images. Raisman had severed the nerve in its spine that controlled its front left paw, then introduced olfactory ensheathing cells to heal the wound. The movie shows the rat before and after the procedure. In the first shot, the rat, favoring its left paw, is unable to grasp the bars of its cage as it tries to climb out. In the second shot, the rat scampers up the side of the cage “with aplomb,” as Raisman put it to me. He then recalled the story of the day he had noticed the animal’s striking recovery. One evening at midnight, he had gone to visit the lab’s rat enclosure—“Rats are more active in the night,” he explained—and held out a bit of crushed Chinese egg noodles. “It put its paw right out and took the food, and realized it could do it, and I realized we had done it,” he says. “To the best of my knowledge, it was the first evidence ever that you could get spinal reconnection.” The pleasure of that moment hadn’t dimmed in almost twenty years. “That rat convinced me,” he says. “That was the eureka moment, I would say, of my existence.”

Raisman was not a practicing doctor. He knew he was not the right person to lead a human trial. “I don’t even know how to read an M.R.I.,” he cheerily concedes. Yet the need for spinal-cord repair in humans was clearly enormous. There is often a particular intensity to the hope of families whose loved ones may spend fifty or sixty years in a wheelchair, and Raisman seems to have a similar focus—he has spent nearly that long trying to help the paralyzed. When I visited him in his hallway, he had a handwritten letter on his counter from a paraplegic who was hoping to be among the next set of patients for the treatment that he had pioneered in Poland. Raisman is eager to help as many people as he can, but he does not try to control or profit from his ideas. “I can’t patent what’s inside your skull!” he says.

That has not stopped others from trying to do so. And, as once advancing areas of spinal research have slowed, many surgeons have tried implanting olfactory ensheathing cells in humans, despite the scarcity of experimental data. (Only a few scientists, in Spain, Canada, and Australia, have published research as rigorous as Raisman’s.) Over the past two decades, thousands of desperate families have paid for these surgeries, which can cost up to fifty thousand dollars and are not covered by insurance. The procedures are performed in countries where ethics oversight is less stringent than in the United States or Britain, and sometimes there are botched results. In 2005, one such surgery was performed, in Lisbon, on a woman in her early twenties; eight years later, she complained of pain, and a biopsy revealed that there was a three-centimetre growth—mostly nasal tissue—on her spinal cord.

The best-known olfactory-ensheathing-cell surgeon is Huang Hongyun, a Chinese doctor who, since 2001, has operated on thousands of patients with spinal damage and other neurological ailments. Huang injected them with olfactory ensheathing cells taken from aborted fetuses, and claimed that some people were walking again within seventy-two hours. In 2005, the BBC asked Raisman and his team to go to Beijing and evaluate Huang’s procedures. In the resulting documentary, “The Doctor Who Makes People Walk Again?,” Raisman is asked in front of a patient what he thinks of the patient’s putative recovery, and he says, distressed, “I can’t assess it.” He and Huang are now friendly—neurorehabilitation is a small community—and he says that he admires him as “a pioneer,” though with caveats. Huang’s work, he told me, choosing his words carefully, “is not done at the thorough level that I would wish it to be done.” (A 2006 investigation of Huang in Neurorehabilitation & Neural Repair, led by James Guest, a Miami neurosurgeon, suggested that Huang had likely both understated medical complications and overstated results. The investigators were not even certain that Huang had been injecting olfactory ensheathing cells. Huang told me that he was an expert in handling such cells, and added that his patients had made “many improvements both in neurological functions and quality of life.”)
After his eureka moment, Raisman began looking for the right doctor to be his partner. He attended conferences and dropped in on small labs that appeared to be doing ambitious work. But he never found the ideal collaborator. Finally, he forged a connection with Pawel Tabakow, a Bulgarian-born neurosurgeon in Wrocław. Raisman recalls, “The others all rushed to say, ‘Ah, yes! Get the cells from anywhere! Stick them in!’ Pawel was careful, logical, and methodical.”

Polish by training and precise by disposition, Tabakow is now forty-six; like Raisman, he rebelled early in his medical studies against the doctrine that the central nervous system could not heal itself. While attending medical school, in the nineties, he read Raisman’s papers on rats and was fascinated. “We did not get any information from our authorities that something like this was possible,” he remembers. Tabakow pursued a Ph.D. in neuroscience, and for his dissertation he extracted ensheathing cells from human cadavers. Raisman learned of this research and made plans to visit Wrocław, where Tabakow had joined the faculty. Raisman came to a realization: “Pawel and I were blood brothers.”

Tabakow became an expert in culturing olfactory ensheathing cells, further impressing his mentor. In 2008, he began operations using the cells on patients with spinal-cord damage. The results of the first two surgeries were mixed: the operations seemed safe, but patients did not improve significantly. In 2010, he invited Raisman to watch a third surgery. “He viewed the entire operation,” Tabakow recounted to a Polish newspaper. “Ten hours standing. He said, ‘What you are doing will make maimed people start walking.’ ” Raisman recalls it differently: “We didn’t need to say it. If we were right, this was a piece of history.”

By the time Darek Fidyka met Pawel Tabakow, a year after his injury, he was desperate. Doctors had told him repeatedly that he would never walk again. Paralysis often leads to other medical problems, and Fidyka had endured lung infections, inflammation in his leg veins, and pressure sores so bad that they had to be treated with a costly special medicine. “My relatives said that the medicine was like liquid gold—it was that expensive,” Fidyka recalls. “I was so weak physically that I could only lie in bed. I couldn’t even go anywhere in my wheelchair.”

A cousin of Fidyka’s who is a doctor read about Tabakow in a newspaper and urged Fidyka to visit Wrocław and ask to become a patient. Fidyka, whose feelings at this point bounced between absolute despair and wild hope, agreed to go, even though he would have no way to pay for the course of treatment. “The price was enough to make angels weep,” he recalls. When Tabakow examined Fidyka, he initially did not like what he saw. Fidyka had a lot of spasticity—uncontrolled muscle contractions suggesting extensive spinal damage—and he seemed very depressed. Then Tabakow looked at Fidyka’s M.R.I. scans. Most spinal-cord injuries are fractures or compressions in which the cord is crushed or twisted, the vertebrae have damaged the nerves, and the resulting wound is a messy mixture of bone, injured neurons, and dead tissue. But Jaroslaw’s knife had slid in between two of Fidyka’s vertebrae, severing his spinal cord almost entirely and leaving a neat half-inch gap. Fewer than five per cent of spinal-cord injuries resemble Fidyka’s. He recalls watching Tabakow examine the scans: “I can see his eyes getting bigger and bigger.”

Tabakow saw the opportunity for an operation that was easier to execute and likely to produce clearer results. He sent Raisman an excited e-mail. For Fidyka, though, a major obstacle remained: the cost. His family organized a town fair to raise money, and by the time he went back to Wrocław for a second appointment he had forty thousand zloty (about ten thousand dollars) in his pocket.

Before finding Fidyka, Tabakow and Raisman were at a crucial point in their project. The ten-hour operation that Raisman had witnessed in 2010 had also not resulted in significant improvement. They had a suspicion about what was going wrong. The olfactory nerve begins in the nasal cavity and ends in the olfactory bulb, in the brain. The olfactory ensheathing cells in the brain, the doctors surmised, were better suited for promoting growth in the spinal cord, since they were accustomed to conditions in the central nervous system. But, because it was unlikely that an ethics board would allow a doctor to operate on the brain of a human for uncertain gain when a simpler and less risky procedure on the sinuses was possible, surgeons in the West had used only ensheathing cells from the nasal cavity.

The doctors felt a strange form of luck, then, when they discovered that Fidyka had sinusitis so severe that he had undergone an operation to remove part of his sinuses. Ever since, his sense of smell had been diminished. Tabakow and Raisman concluded that there would be few usable olfactory ensheathing cells left in Fidyka’s nose. This posed an opportunity. “You have such a promising spinal-cord injury that I can help you,” Tabakow told Fidyka. “But I need to open your skull.”

Fidyka did not hesitate: he still dreamed of being able to climb the hunting blinds outside Pradzew. “Do whatever you can to make it better, because it can’t be any worse,” he answered. Wioletta, his sister, recalls, “For him, it was win or lose—I will walk or I will not live.”

Tabakow told his hospital ethics board that it essentially had no choice. Some doctors, he acknowledged, might insist that the experiment be performed first on pigs or monkeys. But Fidyka didn’t have the time to wait. “If we had been forced to test our approach, it would have taken us three or four years more,” Tabakow recalls. “We had a patient, and it was already two years after the injury. Darek’s spinal cord was just degenerating.” Tabakow told his colleagues that they should not miss “a historical moment.” (Tabakow was more casual about the matter with me, over a lunch of pierogi and cucumber soup cooked at Akson by Fidyka’s mother. “Everything is dangerous,” he told me. “Surgery is dangerous. Life is dangerous.”)

The operation was approved only after the team had shown that physical therapy alone could not ameliorate Fidyka’s condition. He had spent eight months undergoing an intense exercise regimen, along with electrical stimulation of his injured spine. Compared with the state-run rehab facilities he had used before, the private facility’s equipment and staff seemed amazing, he says. It was, he jokes, like selling a Fiat to buy a Mercedes. He worked as hard as he could, but to the doctors’ perverse relief he did not improve at all.

Meanwhile, Wrocław University Hospital had approved the brain operation. In April, 2012, Tabakow, with his medical team, opened up Fidyka’s skull and removed part of his olfactory bulb. The human sense of smell is not very acute, so the olfactory bulb is relatively small—about the size of a sunflower seed. (A goat’s is larger.) Tabakow and his associates next sliced the extracted tissue into two-millimetre sections, isolated the olfactory ensheathing cells, and then gave them almost two weeks to subdivide, in order to have enough cells—half a million—for the operation. Then he opened Fidyka’s spine around the T9 vertebra and made almost a hundred microinjections to situate the cells above and below the wound. He placed more of the cells onto a strip of nerve tissue that he’d extracted from Fidyka’s lower leg and inserted in his spine, in order to help span the gap in his cord. Tabakow closed the incision, and within a few weeks his patient was beginning his real rehabilitation.

Advances did not happen at once, to Fidyka’s immense distress. In the initial weeks after the operation, he was despondent, again feeling that he’d endured more suffering for nothing. “I would ask Darek, ‘Is it better?’ ” Wioletta remembers. “He would say, ‘You can see that I’m not walking!’ ” He vented his frustration, in part, by smoking—not a good idea for a paraplegic. But, from a clinical perspective, the doctors were pleased that it took several months for the first signs of progress to emerge. Neurons take time to grow across such a large gap, and if Fidyka had got stronger immediately it would likely have been a placebo effect.

After five months, Fidyka began to contract the muscles in his left leg again, and around the same time he started feeling things in his right one. His left leg grew noticeably larger, gaining twelve centimetres in circumference in the first eighteen months. This pattern of amelioration suggested to the doctors that the left side of Fidyka’s spine—where most of the olfactory ensheathing cells had been implanted—had experienced the most regrowth. “It is very, very unlikely that this combination would occur except by reconstruction of the nerve pathways,” Raisman says. “That was the thing that suggested reconnection.”

That October, 2014, Raisman and Tabakow published a paper on their work in the journal Cell Transplantation. Raisman began an extensive, and immodest, press campaign. He called the operation a “breakthrough,” adding that “the continuation of our work will be of major benefit to mankind.”

Since the operation, Fidyka’s core muscles have become strong enough for him to drive a specially designed Renault Mégane that has a braking device on the steering column. Behind the wheel, he looks almost well. He has become a celebrity in Poland, and when the police stop him for speeding they let him go. (Tabakow, for his part, was invited to meet the President of Poland.)

Fidyka’s sexual function has also improved, and last May he told a Polish television station, “Anyone in a wheelchair will agree with me that this is probably the most important thing in this entire situation.” Fidyka is not lonely; he told me that he has received a surprising number of marriage proposals over the Internet. “Polish women are the best and the most beautiful,” he added, noting that he has a girlfriend.

When Fidyka goes to Pradzew on weekends, he sleeps in his parents’ home, in a ground-floor bedroom. A metal gurney helps him lift himself out of bed. Villages in the Polish countryside are not designed for wheelchairs, but he can now drive to friends’ houses to drink beer and watch soccer. He cannot hunt, but he drives into the woods with his friends and observes from the Renault. “I don’t think shooting from the car is very humanitarian,” he jokes. One clear benefit of the surgery has been psychological: Wioletta says that her brother has become nicer and more open.

His family, like many families of disabled people, is fiercely optimistic. Wioletta has left unfinished a wall that Darek began painting before his accident—one day, she tells him, he will complete the job. Fidyka prides himself on his determination, but also tries to be realistic. “Anyone who thinks that it would be O.K. to be in a wheelchair should sit in one for two weeks—and have an accident in your pants,” he told me.

He cannot work, and his disability pension amounts to the equivalent of two hundred and forty dollars a month. Thanks to Raisman, his rehabilitation is now funded by the Nicholls Spinal Injury Foundation, in London. The foundation has given Raisman nearly a million pounds to finance his research, and this has been matched by the U.K. Stem Cell Foundation. But at times this good fortune adds to Fidyka’s anxiety. He worries what will happen—to him and to the research project—if his progress stops. He therefore makes an extra effort whenever Tabakow comes to Akson to observe him.

While I was visiting, Tabakow showed up in the gym. Fidyka, wearing below-the-knee braces, pedalled a stationary bike in front of him for the first time. The doctor was impressed, and said that he’d send a video to Raisman. Fidyka seemed relieved; he had scored another success.

Toward the end of the session, Stefan Okurowski, Fidyka’s chief therapist, pulled him into an upright position. He slotted his patient’s legs into metal braces with leather straps that laced up to his thighs. Being able to stand with braces had been a milestone for Fidyka. Wioletta remembers receiving a thrilled text from him: “Sister, I’m standing on my feet!” Around the same time, one of her children patted his leg during a family visit, and Fidyka startled. It was then that she realized he could feel again.

Okurowski stood behind Fidyka and frog-walked him past various exercise machines to a pair of bars. The patients from the morning had gone home, and two new ones were in the room: a former policewoman who had been hit on the head by a bale of hay, and a boy, lying immobile, who doesn’t remember how he fell from a balcony. (“Some stupidity of youth,” he said.) All the patients at Akson know about Fidyka—and they are by turns hopeful, jealous, and uncertain about him. For most of them, the prospect of brain surgery is frightening. But when Fidyka does his routine he is like a math prodigy called to the blackboard.

Okurowski, who has a bearlike physique, placed Fidyka so that he could hold on to the parallel bars. The eyes of the other patients followed him. Fidyka steadied himself like a skier at the start of a downhill slalom and then began—painfully, laboriously—to put one foot in front of the other. He likes to joke that the scar left by the operation to remove a part of the olfactory bulb from his forehead makes him look like Frankenstein, and his stiff walk, combined with his shaved head, accentuated the impression. Nevertheless, it was a thrill to sense his brain sending commands to his legs.

After about a dozen steps, he turned around and walked back, looking exhausted. “On a good day, I can walk for an hour and a half,” he said. In recent months, Fidyka’s progress has continued. He can now walk fifteen feet in braces with crutches; he has gone to a park and pedalled a tricycle for several hundred yards. “This was a complex cöordination between trunk and lower-limb muscles,” Tabakow noted.
Some researchers have raised doubts about the procedure that seemingly got Fidyka on his feet. Surgery that is effective for a cut spinal cord, they point out, may well not work for the far more common problem of a compressed or fractured cord. Other doctors have noted that a thin strip of tissue on the right side of Fidyka’s spinal cord survived the attack, and argue that this may have been the real source of his partial recovery. A third contingent theorizes that the bridge of nerve tissue taken from Fidyka’s lower leg—not the olfactory ensheathing cells—deserves the credit. (Raisman points out that other doctors’ attempts to use peripheral nerve tissue to repair spinal-cord damage have not been successful.) James Guest, the Miami neurosurgeon who cast doubt on Huang Hongyun’s claims, took the unusual step of publishing a letter to the editor of the Journal of Neurotrauma, highlighting the many open questions. He also registered his objection to the decision to open Fidyka’s skull, noting that this had courted “serious risks of infection, bleeding, and loss of olfactory function.” Recently, he e-mailed me to say that, though Raisman and Tabakow’s work might well have value, the report “came with a level of attention and statements that exceeded what can be realistically interpreted from a single and rather complex case.”

On this point, even Raisman’s friends agree. Jerry Silver, a neuroscience professor at Case Western Reserve University, in Ohio, who has collaborated with him in the past, said, “I think Geoff’s on the right track. But it’s only an n of 1”—a study of a single patient—“and it’s a very special kind of lesion.”

Raisman and Tabakow acknowledge in their paper that they can’t prove that the olfactory ensheathing cells from Fidyka’s brain alone made the difference. Maybe it was the fact that some immature neurons were injected with the olfactory ensheathing cells; maybe it was the removal of scar tissue during surgery. Maybe it was a combination of various factors. The best science happens when the signal can be isolated from the noise, but there was a lot going on in the operating room in Wrocław. “We were looking for a treatment, not proof of principle,” Raisman says, his voice rising defensively.

Raisman and Tabakow are now searching for new patients. Some will undergo Tabakow’s procedure. Others will be operated on by a neurosurgeon in England. To add further rigor, independent observers will be called on to evaluate the patients’ progress. It will not be easy for the doctors to find candidates like Fidyka—a man with an ideally situated wound, a good work ethic, a bad nose, and a strong support network. But Tabakow believes that, as he gets better at the surgery, subsequent patients will recover even more function than Fidyka has. He estimates that the surgery and rehab have restored fewer than ten per cent of Fidyka’s neurons.

“If Geoff does this, he’d be on track to win the Nobel Prize,” Adrian Pini, a professor of neurodegeneration at King’s College London, says. That is, if a rival therapy doesn’t succeed first. Doctors are experimenting with enzymes that prevent scar tissue from forming on the spine. At the University of Louisville, epidural electrical stimulation of the spinal cord has enabled five young men with complete lower-limb paralysis to move their legs again. Susan Howley, who is the head of research at the Reeve Foundation, says, “I would stress that there isn’t a thing out there that’s perfect. This is an iterative process. We’re still turning over the stones.” She considers olfactory ensheathing cells a potentially valuable stone. But she doesn’t want to lapse into hype: this is a field where caution is a necessary defense mechanism. “Even the strongest studies have proved difficult to replicate,” John Martin, an expert on brain and spinal-cord injury at the CUNY School of Medicine, points out.

In 2014, after the BBC ran its documentary on Fidyka, Raisman received more than two thousand letters asking for help. “I’ve stopped counting,” he told me. It was impossible not to detect the pride that he was trying to suppress, but being the object of desperate yearning does make him uncomfortable. He prefers to see himself as a guru leading a contingent of believers among the unenlightened. He has been ill lately, but this has not curtailed his ambitions—or his commitment to his cause. The field of spinal-cord regeneration is fiercely competitive. The only decoration in Raisman’s corridor at University College is a Chinese translation of a Turkish proverb: “May our enemies not prosper.”

Fidyka, meanwhile, accepts that the hunting blinds may remain out of reach. But, he says, “When I go shopping, I’d like to be able to walk to and from the car with a walker.” He adds, “If not for my strong spirit, I wouldn’t even be here now. Psyche is the most important element.” ♦

Sunday, January 17, 2016

What Donald Trump’s Plaza Deal Reveals About His White House Bid

By DAVID SEGAL NY TIMES


The day Donald Trump called and asked for a one-on-one meeting in the winter of 1988, Tom Barrack was a relative newcomer to the high-stakes poker game of New York real estate. He had worked for nearly two years for Robert Bass, the Texas billionaire investor, and had played an important role in winning the Plaza Hotel for his boss the year before. Mr. Trump was the country’s most quotable and ostentatious financial celebrity, a guy with a jet, a 282-foot yacht and a fondness for peach-toned marble.

But among the people he negotiated with, Mr. Trump had a reputation for both steeliness and finesse. So Mr. Barrack was wary. A mere four months after Mr. Bass had taken control of the Plaza, he gave Mr. Barrack the go-ahead to put it up for auction. Mr. Trump was calling to say, in effect, skip the auction. We’ll strike a deal, the two of us, right here in my office.

“Just come over,” Mr. Trump said, in Mr. Barrack’s recollection. “Give me half an hour.”

Mr. Barrack was soon sitting in Mr. Trump’s office in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. The two had met a few times, because Mr. Trump had been angling to acquire the Plaza for years. Now that it was going back on the market, Mr. Trump didn’t want to miss out.

“How can I live without it?” Mr. Trump asked, gesturing to the Plaza, which could be seen from his window, just two blocks north. “It’s right in my backyard.”

“You should own it,” Mr. Barrack replied. “But you’re going to have to pay for it.”

Mr. Trump quickly agreed to a price of slightly more than $400 million, an unprecedented sum for a hotel at the time. Just a few years later, the Plaza wound up in bankruptcy protection, part of a vast and humiliating restructuring of some $900 million of personal debt that Mr. Trump owed to a consortium of banks. Never one for regrets, Mr. Trump today regards the purchase as a triumph.

“To me the Plaza was like a great painting,” he said in an interview in late December. “It wasn’t purely about the bottom line. I have many assets like that and the end result is that they are always much more valuable than what you paid for them.”

How Mr. Trump came to own, operate and then lose the Plaza reveals a lot about his business style. For decades, Mr. Trump has boasted of his boardroom skills in self-exalting speeches and books. As the front-runner in the Republican presidential race, he frequently argues that his corner-office prowess uniquely suits him to negotiate with world leaders.
What does this prowess look like up close? In the Plaza tale, Mr. Trump demonstrated both strengths (an ability to charm or strong-arm, as the occasion required) and weaknesses (a kind of hungry impatience that left him searching for new trophies as soon as one had been acquired). His methods as a political candidate mirror his methods as an executive, say those who have dealt with the latter and seen the former. In fact, the more you know about Mr. Trump’s past, the more his run for high office looks like an effort to close the biggest deal of his life.
“He has the ability to imagine what the other party wants him to be and then be that person,” said Michael D’Antonio, author of “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success.” “He presents the Trump that will work in the moment.”

A Disarming Dealmaker

When Mr. Trump made that call to Mr. Barrack he was 41 and New York City’s showiest developer. Then, as now, his braggadocio could sound like a parody of braggadocio. There was, for instance, the moment in 1984 when he told The Washington Post he could handle the United States’ side of nuclear arms talks with the Soviets.

“It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” he boasted. “I think I know most of it anyway.”

By 1987, he had casinos in Atlantic City, a mansion in Palm Beach, Trump Tower, all the trappings of an up-and-coming tycoon, along with a best seller, “The Art of the Deal.” What Mr. Trump lacked was the kind of old-money Manhattan landmark that would add prestige to his portfolio.

The Plaza, which he’d been yearning to buy since his mid-20s, was that landmark. The hotel had opened in 1907, a 19-story French Renaissance “chateau” with roughly 800 rooms. It billed itself as “the world’s most luxurious hotel,” and over the years its habitués included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marlene Dietrich and Frank Lloyd Wright, who lived there while construction of the Guggenheim Museum was underway. When the Beatles performed on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964, they stayed at the Plaza.
Mr. Bass came into possession of the Plaza when he, along with a Japanese corporation, bought its owner, the Westin chain. Mr. Bass was enamored with the hotel’s history and cachet, but he had little experience in the hospitality industry.

As Mr. Bass pondered the matter, Mr. Barrack, who was based in Manhattan, started to appreciate that the Plaza could fetch an irresistible price. By February 1988, he was readying an auction.

It was around this time that Mr. Trump picked up the phone and requested that half-hour meeting with Mr. Barrack at Trump Tower.

To understand what happened next, you need to know that in every real estate deal, the two big variables are price and contingencies. The latter come after an initial purchase price is agreed to and are essentially conditions demanded by the buyer after a thorough inspection of the property. A condition could be a problem with the plumbing, the roof or a thousand other particulars, and every condition can reduce the price of the property. With a building as old as the Plaza, a proper inspection could take months and include union contracts and an assortment of licenses for food and drink.

On the phone, when Mr. Trump asked him to abandon the auction, Mr. Barrack initially thought it was a ploy related to contingencies.
“I told him: ‘You’re too good. You’ll want to buy it and it will get tied up in all these contingencies.’ He said, ‘No, it’ll be a real deal.’ I said, ‘No contingencies.’”

Once in Mr. Trump’s office, the haggling began. Mr. Barrack said he expected 10 to 15 participants in the coming auction and an ultimate price as high as $500 million. What if I gave you $390 million today? Mr. Trump asked. Mr. Bass has an offer of $410 million in hand, Mr. Barrack countered. Mr. Trump raised his bid, and they settled on a final price of $407.5 million.

“Then he did something amazing,” Mr. Barrack recalled. “He said: ‘You’ve owned the property for four months. I want you to tell me everything that’s wrong with it and how to fix it. I said, ‘We just said, no contingencies.’ He said: ‘This is not in a contract. Nothing in writing. Just tell me what is wrong with the property and how to fix it.’”

In essence, Mr. Trump was telling Mr. Barrack that he trusted him to disclose everything that a team of lawyers and inspectors would typically need at least 90 days to unearth. It was like asking an enemy for a map of a minefield. And by saying, in effect, “I’m at your mercy and will believe what you tell me,” Mr. Trump was appealing to Mr. Barrack’s integrity. Which was very disarming.

Mr. Barrack thought over Mr. Trump’s question for a moment. He had already worked out most of the major problems.

“The biggest issue,” he told Mr. Trump, “is Fannie Lowenstein.”

He was referring to a woman, who might have been in her 80s, who lived by herself in a tiny, rent-controlled apartment in the Plaza. With Ms. Lowenstein there, reconfiguring the building as a condominium or a co-op, which was Mr. Trump’s plan and the only way to justify the $407 million price tag, would be far more difficult. But she had adamantly refused to give up her rent-control rights and move to a larger apartment in the Plaza.
Donald Trump: Presidential Candidates on the Issues
“I’ll do the deal in a week, for $407.5 million,” Mr. Trump said, “and you take care of Fannie Lowenstein. All I want at the closing is to hear that Fannie Lowenstein is happy.”

Mr. Barrack left the meeting in a daze, both thrilled and anxious.

“It was a genius deal for Trump,” Mr. Barrack said, “because while an auction would have fetched a bigger initial price, it would have been tangled up in contingencies. And he’d just convinced me to fix everything for him.”

Mr. Trump had correctly sized up Mr. Barrack: someone who was trying to prove himself and wanted a major coup.

“He kind of looked at me and said, ‘I’ll make you a star,’” said Mr. Barrack, who now runs Colony Capital, a real estate investment firm based in Los Angeles with 300 employees. “It’s the same talent on display when he gives political speeches. He reads an entire crowd with the same precision that he reads an individual.”

For Mr. Barrack, winning over Ms. Lowenstein was a project. She knew more about tenant law than any lawyer, and for the next two months, the two spoke four or five times a week. He ultimately offered her an apartment in the Plaza that was almost 10 times as large as her studio apartment, with a view of Central Park. Rent-free. For life. Also, new furniture, new dishes, new everything. She grudgingly agreed. But she also wanted a piano. She got a Steinway.
To Mr. Barrack’s amazement, Mr. Trump handled nearly all of the negotiations for the Plaza himself. Much as Mr. Trump is doing in his current campaign, which is notably lacking in consultants and pollsters, he operated largely by gut instinct.

When Mr. Trump did consult outside counsel about the Plaza, his instructions were to make as little trouble as possible, no matter how daunting the numbers looked.

“He toned me down,” recalled Jonathan A. Bernstein, then a lawyer at Dreyer & Traub. “He had come to the conclusion that this was a deal he wanted to do, and he was completely aware of the downsides, and my job was to get him the best legal document I could. You don’t tell him, ‘Are you crazy?’ You say: ‘It’s $400 million and $12 million in N.O.I.,’” or net operating income. “‘Are you O.K. with that?’”

Huge Debt, Lost Prize

Once he owned the hotel, Mr. Trump put his wife, Ivana, in charge of renovating it, paying her, as he put it at the time, “one dollar a year plus all the dresses she can buy.” She and a team oversaw a restoration that included new paint, new furniture and a revival of the major public spaces, like the Palm Court tearoom.

“Some of it came out great; some of it came out kind of chintzy,” said Barbara Res, then an employee of the Trump Organization. “We went about trying to restore it but in a way that didn’t cost too much money.”
Mr. Trump offered design opinions and growled when necessary. After a hotel union put up resistance to changes requested by his wife — that ashtrays be regularly stamped with the Plaza’s logo, for instance — Mr. Trump issued a threat.

“I called these guys up,” he told The New York Times soon after the purchase, “and said, ‘Do it, or I’ll turn the Plaza into a condo with three janitors and a super.’”

Opinion was split over the merits of the deal. Among the many who thought that Donald Trump had overpaid was Donald Trump. In a full-page ad he took out in New York magazine in November 1988, he called the transaction “the first time in my life I have knowingly made a deal which was not economic — for I can never justify the price I paid, no matter how successful the Plaza becomes.”

This proved prescient. By 1990, the Plaza needed an operating profit of $40 million a year to break even, according to financial records that Mr. Trump disclosed at the time. The hotel had fallen well short of that goal, and with renovating expenses, in one year it burned through $74 million more than it brought in.

But Mr. Trump didn’t spend a lot of time sweating over the Plaza’s finances. He was too busy with new challenges. A few months after the Plaza deal closed, he purchased the Eastern Air Shuttle for $365 million, and in 1990, he opened the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, which cost $1 billion to build. Some of the loans he took out to pay for deals were personally guaranteed.

“The fact is, you do feel invulnerable,” Mr. Trump told Timothy O’Brien, author of “Trump Nation,” discussing this period in his life. “And then you have a tendency to take your eye off the ball a little bit and hunt around for women. And hunt around for models.”

What Donald Trump Would Need to Do to Win
A lack of focus was not Mr. Trump’s only problem. The updraft in the real estate market of the ’80s turned into a headwind by the early ’90s, and more than $3 billion in loans — $900 million of which were personally guaranteed — went into default. Dozens of banks came calling and, after lengthy negotiations, a meeting was held in a large conference room in the law offices of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, the firm that represented the largest lender, Citibank. There, some 50 bankers and lawyers watched Mr. Trump sign over nearly all of his properties — the Plaza, other buildings, the shuttle, the yacht, the jet — in exchange for more favorable terms on his personal guarantees.

The banks could have easily toppled Mr. Trump into personal bankruptcy, “but we all agreed that he’d be better alive than dead,” said Alan Pomerantz, then head of the real estate department at Weil. “We needed him to help sell all of his assets, and the deal was that as he sold off more, we’d reduce his personal guarantee.”

In effect, the banks allowed Mr. Trump to remain solvent so that they could get the benefit of his gift for salesmanship. In exchange, the banks provided him with $450,000 a month to operate his business and cover personal expenses. It was so tight a leash that when Marla Maples, his girlfriend at the time, turned up on television waving the costly Harry Winston diamond she’d been given as an engagement ring, the paymasters wanted a word with the groom-to-be.

“I didn’t buy it,” Mr. Trump said, according to Mr. Pomerantz. It was a three-month loaner, given in exchange for on-air mentions of Harry Winston.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump called that story “completely false.”

The banks shopped the Plaza around, without success, for a few years before finally selling it in a deal that valued it at $325 million to a partnership between Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia and CDL Hotels International of Singapore in 1995. None of the proceeds went to Mr. Trump, according to several people involved.
Still, he told me that the sale was yet another victory. The terms were, to use one of his favorite words, fantastic, and relieved him of a vast personal debt.

“One of the great deals was the Plaza, because way beyond the price, I was able to get favors from the banks and from others,” he said. Speaking of Prince Alwaleed, he added: “He paid too much for the hotel. He wanted that hotel so badly, and I put him through the wringer and made a great deal.”

Of course, it cost the Saudi-Singapore partnership $75 million less than Mr. Trump had spent for the same building seven years earlier. Mr. Trump also claimed in the interview that he owned 100 percent of the Plaza until the day it was sold, a version of events totally at odds with published reports at the time and the recollections of others involved in the deal.

This may be yet another parallel to Mr. Trump’s performance on the hustings, where he has bent the truth into so many outlandish shapes that PolitiFact anointed his entire campaign the 2015 Lie of the Year. Among the more memorable whoppers: a Twitter post that 81 percent of whites are killed by blacks (PolitiFact cites the true figure as 15 percent) and that on television he’d seen thousands of people in Jersey City cheering the collapse of the World Trade Center.

Mr. Trump’s prediction that the Plaza would be worth far more than it cost him did come true. Unfortunately for him, it happened in 2004, when the hotel was sold yet again, this time for $675 million to an Israeli developer who carved up the rooms in the way that Mr. Trump had originally imagined. Half of the building was turned into condominiums, which eventually sold for a total of $1.4 billion.

Feuding With the Prince

Today, Mr. Trump’s brief ownership of the Plaza is one of the least-known chapters of a protean career. It was not the last time one of his properties would need the shelter of bankruptcy protection, and it marked the beginning of his transition from an owner of major assets to a manager of major assets. An increasing share of his wealth would come in the future from licensing his name, not just to builders but sellers of suits, cologne, chandeliers, mattresses and more. In professional parlance, he went from “asset heavy” to “asset light.”

The Plaza deal also demonstrated both his intense drive and ambition as well as his tendency to spread himself dangerously thin as he looks for other conquests. Abraham Wallach, a former executive at the Trump Organization, said Mr. Trump was a man without any conventional vices, but he had a hopeless addiction to notoriety and was always prowling for another deal that would gain attention and enhance his status.

“I’ve been shocked he has demonstrated such focus during the presidential campaign,” Mr. Wallach said. “In business, he would focus for about two or three days before the closing, and after that he would lose interest.”

Recently, the hotel and a central character in this narrative have intersected with his presidential run. After Mr. Trump called in December for a “complete shutdown” on Muslims’ entry into the United States, Prince Alwaleed posted on Twitter: “You are a disgrace not only to the G.O.P. but to all America. Withdraw from the U.S. presidential race as you will never win.”

Mr. Trump returned fire: “Dopey Prince @Alwaleed_Talal wants to control our U.S. politicians with daddy’s money. Can’t do it when I get elected.”

That same day, Dec. 11, Mr. Trump gave a speech at a luncheon where he was heckled by protesters waving signs that read, “Stop the war on immigrant communities” and “Trump, making America hate again.” Several people were ejected from the building.

The building was the Plaza Hotel.

Rosewood