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mhm. Uh huh, Uh huh. He was from Mhm. Mhm two. Yeah, yeah, yeah, hi, I'm Senator Lawton Child's and I want to welcome you to the Lawton Child's update Today. We're going to look at the 1989 federal budget and see how it will shape our country's future.

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We'll also learn what's being done in the area of spinal cord research at the University of Florida. But first, let's take a look at the Florida manatee. Manatee has been part of Florida's environment for thousands of years. They were valued by prehistoric Indians for their meat and hides.

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Ceremonial pipe shaped like manatees, have been found in archaeological logical digs. Early Florida Indians, soul manatees to Spanish explorers for food. All the laws were passed in 18 93 to protect the manatee. Hunting continued till after World War two. The manatee is now protected by the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973.

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10 years ago, the state enacted the Florida Manatee Sanctuary Act and established the entire state of Florida is a refuge and sanctuary. But even with all these laws to protect the manatee, its population continues to decline. The manatee is an endangered species. This marine mammal belong to an order Serena believed to evolved from four footed animals more than 60 million years ago.

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One of the closest land relative to the manatee is the elephant. Manatees look a lot like a seal or a walrus. Adults can reach a length of more than 12 ft and can weigh up to £3500. This large, docile animal is sparsely covered with hair and has stiff whiskers growing around its mouth and face.

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The eyes of the manatee are wide set with a thin protective membrane, which allows them to stay open while underwater. Experts say the manatee suffers from poor eyesight but has a keen sense of hearing. The manatee is an urban boy or plant eating animals and spends about five hours a day feeding on freshwater plants and sea grasses.

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Manatees seems to particularly enjoy water hyacinth and hydrilla. The Florida manatee lives in freshwater and moves freely between salinity extremes. During colder periods of the year from October through March, the animals flock to the warm springs throughout the state. One is that Crystal River, about 60 miles north of Tampa.

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Matthew Clemens is with the Florida Park Service and works at Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge. Matt describes the migration cycle of the manatee. They'll come in and out of the rivers, uh, and the base during various times a year, depending on the cold fronts. In the wintertime, they'll move out into the river and out into the gulf on the warmer periods between the front.

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As it gets colder, they may go to Florida power and light to the discharge canal there. Although it doesn't seem to be a real popular spot and then into the crystal and homicidal rivers into the spring areas as refugees, he explained the boating speed zones. The traditional dates on November 15th to March 1st.

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Um, this year it was October 1st, um so the last couple years have come in early in October, so they've changed the traditional season in this area. The speed zones. The Crystal River area has one of the largest concentration of manatees. As many as 200 of the estimated 1200 manatees statewide spend the winter here in 1982 the nearby Kings Bay Islands were purchased by nature Conservancy for $425 and donated to the federal Fish and Wildlife Service.

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Today, the islands make up the Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge and the manatees habitat is protected and regulated by the wildlife service. Divers and snorkelers also come to these warm waters, but cannot swim in protective areas, which have been set aside for the animals. What was beginning to look like it was happening was that the with no restrictions.

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The divers were so eager to see manatees that they would pursue the animals and forced them out of the spring area back out into the cold waters of the bay. So there's no entry zones. It's still right up on the edge of the main spring where the warm water is.

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So now the masses feel are being harassed. They only have to move back into the buoys, and the awareness is high enough that if someone does enter there, there's usually enough votes out of spring, and someone will tell them to get out. The biggest danger facing the manatee is man, and barges and powerboats account for most of the deaths.

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High speed propellers cut the slow moving manatees and boats often crack their skulls and break their backs. More than 900 manatees have been scarred by powerboats. The state of Florida teams with private organizations to care for injured manatees. Seaworld takes care of manatees in the central and northern half of the state, while the Miami Seaquarium handles the southern portion.

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The animals are treated and cared for at the parks until they're well enough to be released. Manatees have studied, and the data that's collected is used by the state and its ongoing research efforts. Matthew Clements says disease and other development of manatees, habitat areas or other factors threatening manatees mantes appear to be very susceptible to respiratory ailments from the cold water.

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Once the water reaches a certain point, it appears that the the energy balance is such that they'll shut down feeding. It's more energetically fish for them not to feed for those periods. If they get caught out in a severe cold front and a long lasting cold front, then you have a lot of winter what they call winter kill, and it's characterized by empty stomachs and they basically just starve to death to play all their fat reserves in the future.

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More long term development in this area of Florida is going to affect their aunties More and more. They're talking about a new development called Bets Farm in the Crystal River called Bets Farm. Okay, well, approximately double the population of Crystal River. Even though it's not on the river, All those people are gonna wanna do boating.

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And the more boats you got on the river, the better chance you have is you're gonna have, uh, large collisions with the manatees. So in the long term, enforcement is going to be a big thing. Green Patrol, fish quality service. Everyone's understaffed and in particular, in this area, it's just gonna be a major concern.

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In 1981 then Governor Bob Graham and singer Jimmy Buffett organized to save the Manatee Committee. The committee's aim is to educate the public about the plight of the manatee. The Department of Natural Resources in the Florida Marine Patrol operate a manatee hotline. This toll free telephone number was established to report dead or injured manatees.

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Yes, the Florida manatee is a national treasure for everyone to enjoy. They depend on each of us for their survival. And you can do your part by observing voting speed limits and manatee areas and getting involved with the Save the Manatee Club. When we return, we'll see what's being done in the area of spinal cord research.

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Hi, I'm Jimmy Buffett, chairman of the Save the Manatee Committee, To find out how you can help save the manatee right to save the manatee. 11. Oh, one Ottoman Way. Maitland, Florida 3 to 751 Help us out. Thank you. If you see an injured manatee or someone who's harassing manatees, give the manatee hotline a call.

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Toll free is 1 803 4218 to 1. Welcome back. The University of Florida is on the leading edge of spinal cord research. In the past, people with spinal cord injuries had very little hope for living a full and active life. But all that may be changing, thanks to the help of Catherine and Charlie Mac Overstreet of Pasco County, the over streets, became involved in the issue in 1971 when their son became paralyzed from waist down after an accident in 1983 the over streets donated $1.2 million to endow to academic chairs and spinal cord research at the University of Florida.

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Their gift established the university's Health Science Center is one of the country's leading spinal cord regeneration laboratories. Under the guidance of Dr Paul RYR and George Cyprus, the university is now charting waters, which were only dreamed of a short time ago. Dr. Cyprus has been focusing on the function of both normal and grafted spinal cord nerves.

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He's been cited as one of the nation's outstanding spinal neurosurgeons. Dr. Cypriot explained how it all began about a decade ago. Dr John Munson, who is a professor in the Department of Neuroscience, and I became began a collaborative effort here at the University of Florida to study the function and recovery of function of the spinal cord.

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Were both scientifically are physiologists. And so we're interested in how the spinal cord works and how, when it loses its functions to work, for instance, the ability of the spinal cord because our movements of our arms and legs, how does it recover function cannot recover function and can we improve recovery of function?

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In other words, hopefully to be able to get people or animals that are injured to be able to move their arms and legs in a useful way like they did before. And so that's been the predominant interest of our research program over the past 10 years.

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What subsequently happened was the Overstreet family, endowed to major eminent scholar professorship chairs here at the University of Florida and recruited Dr Paul Rare, which, uh added to the program here at the University of Florida to develop a nicely recognized center for investigating recovery of function, regeneration of the spinal cord and the nervous system.

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And at this point in time, the University of Florida College of Medicine has made a major effort and commitment to recovery function of the spinal cord after injury. Dr. Cyprus has spent a great deal of time studying the electrical properties of nerve cells. Through his research, we've learned that the spinal cord doesn't die after injury.

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Instead, the tissue above and below the injured section continues to function. Basically, what actually happens is that where this cord is injured at that point and what we call a complete injury, where there is no function that goes through, that the brain doesn't communicate with the spinal cord, it's only that small segment or varying length.

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But it's a segmental loss of function, meaning that the elements inside the spinal cord at that level die. But the spinal cord actually remains intact, down, below and above the area of injury. And so what our focus has to be is on wherever the segment of injury of the spinal cord occurs.

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And my lab program research program is predominantly interested in trying to get more recovery of function. Since we do have living intact nervous tissue above and below that, how do we maximize that intact, uh, portions of the nervous system that still left to recover its function in a useful manner?

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Dr. Paul Ryan has been concentrating his efforts in the area of nerve cell transplants. Dr. R has successfully transplanted fetal nerve cells in the laboratory. Rats was, Dr Seifert had mentioned, uh, once there's an injury to the spinal cord. Essentially, there is a loss of function below the level of lesion, and so one of the objectives of our research program is to find a way to rebuild the spinal cord, such that we can put in some type of a bridge that will essentially anatomically reunite the injured or separated segments of the spinal cord in a way that will then allow some function to be restored below the level of injury.

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And so, essentially, the approach that we're taking right now is to use embryonic neural tissue, in this case fetal spinal cord tissue. And this is all experiments that are now being done in the rodent and what we're taking our little pieces of embryonic spinal cord and putting them into lesions of the spinal of the adult rat spinal cord.

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We've also done this in young animals as well and basically asking this tissue to grow. And in sense, it's like dropping a little piece of material into the Grand Canyon and watching a billow up and fill the cavity of the canyon. So in that sense, what we're asking is this tissue should grow, and as it grows, it should integrate with the with the head end of the spinal cord and the tail and so to speak, and essentially spliced this long cable of nerve tissue back together again.

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Dr. Ryan outlined the program's overall gold. Now, in terms of our overall goal, we obviously are concerned with restoring function, meaning as everybody usually thinks about restoring walking and ambulatory behavior at the same time, one has to recognize that this is a very, very difficult problem to deal with.

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On the other hand, there are certain functions that the spinal cord does have a role in, for example, certain types of pain modulation control, bladder, bowel function, things of this nature. And it may be the These transplants will have a very effective way of dealing with some of the problems secondary problems of cord injury, for example, many patients with cord injury experience, a great deal of pain.

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And so perhaps one of the first things that we may see is not necessarily a restoration of walking, but some recovery from the extreme pain that these people feel. And basically, I think the problem with spinal cord injury research over the years, as everybody has focused on, sort of hitting the bullseye immediately and unfortunately they get very easily discouraged.

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Our feeling is we're after hitting the bullseye, but at the same time, we're not going to ignore some other values that these transplants may offer. Doctor, are explained the operation. Okay, this is an illustration of what we're doing currently using the rat as our experimental model.

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Essentially, we're taking fetuses of of a certain stage of gestation and taking out a segment of their spinal cords and then taking these segments and transplanting them into cavities that we make experimentally in adult rodent spinal cords. And as you can see, this little piece of tissue barely fills this cavity.

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However, in time it will grow and actually fill the cavity not only from the bottom to the top, but from one end to the other. And so in that sense, we experimentally have gone from this point, which is a very artificial lesion, and found that we can rebuild the spinal cord.

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Currently, what we're doing now is making lesions that are very similar to what occurs in the human injury situation and putting transplants of tissue into those lesions. And we're finding that in fact, we can rebuild those injuries by taking this embryonic spinal cord tissue and putting it into these cavities.

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We've seen under one set of experimental conditions that these tissues will grow. They do fuse with the head end, one end of the spinal cord and the other, and it is well filled from bottom to top. So in a sense, we're rebuilding this long cable. In addition, we found that the nerve cells that are present in these graphs are sending their fibers into the host to some degree, and likewise, we're seeing the nerve cells in the host.

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They're sending their fibers into these transplants. So what that means is that if there's nerve fiber connection or projection from one to the other, there is a basis for some type of functional connectivity. Okay, this is a histological section of an injured spinal cord to illustrate what we actually deal with in terms of the cord injury.

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And basically what you see is that there's a central zone of capitation. There's a big hole in the center of the spinal cord. Ordinarily, this would be completely filled. This is at the level of injury, And so what the whole is all about is is it reflects the degeneration of neural tissue at that level of injury.

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And surrounding this whole are some nerve fibers, some of which are dying, others, which are actually still intact. But you can see there's a tremendous loss of tissue at the level of injury In contrast, the next slide is another section through that same spinal cord as it would appear either below or above the level of the injury.

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And what you can see now is that short of a little enlargement in the center of the spinal cord, most of the tissue looks very nice and intact, so it shows that there is a lot of living or viable nerve tissue both below and above the injury site.

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So essentially what we're trying to do then is to rebuild that big cavity that was shown in the previous section, which extends for several, uh, fractions of an inch, if you will. Both towards the head and toward the tail end of the spinal cord is one example of what we've achieved.

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We have another section this time. It's cut lengthwise in the spinal cord, and this is now after transplantation, and toward the left hand side you see some dark tissue, which represents the host spinal cord, the recipient spinal cord. And then as we move more towards the right hand side, you begin to see some lighter stain material that represents the transplant, and you can see that this transplant as we move going now from the head toward the tail end of the spinal cord, fills that long lesion completely and then begins to fuse at the tail end of the host spinal cord.

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So now we're progressively moving toward the host spinal cord. So in effect, what we have then in this lesion cavity is viable nerve tissue that had been grafted and is now forming essentially a long bridge across the Silesian cavity. And the objective, as mentioned earlier, is to see whether this will serve to help regrowth of injured nerve fibers from one end of the spinal cord to the other, or serve to form a relay bridge, which allows functional communication between the separated ends of the spinal cord.

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I think the basic point is that at the time that we started these experiments, it was interesting that people have had done transplants of embryonic tissue in the brain and found tremendous success. On the other hand, the few tries that had been made in the spinal cord there was absolutely no success at all, and that was very much like what had happened in the 19 forties, and we persisted a little bit at that and found that there were a few tricks that had to be done and now we were able to get that successful growth, according to Dr Are the future holds renewed hope.

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But I think if one looks at the last 10 years, we've gone from looking at this problem of spinal cord injury as being hopeless, as I said earlier, to a point now where there's really an element of some type of hope and promise or optimism and so I don't know for sure if this approach or any others that are going on now will necessarily be the absolute cure.

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On the other hand, I think that these approaches are opening new doors and I think it's very important that we're looking now at a problem that was just absolutely hopeless to one where if we persist at it, I think we may come up with something. How soon that's going to be is going to be dependent on a lot of factors, some that are intangible and we don't have control over.

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But at the same time, I don't think that this is an issue that you want to give up on very readily because I think that there's a lot here and we're feeling more and more optimistic every day we work at this. So I think I think there's no way to predict.

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And the clinical applications of spinal cord transplanting are still a long ways all. But thanks to Dr Cyprus and rare and the gift from the Overstreet family, there may be some hope. As chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee, which oversees spending on medical research, I'm delighted to see how much progress has been made, hopefully, through the efforts of the University of Florida.

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There may be a day soon when paralysis from spinal cord injuries will be a thing of the past. When we return, we'll take a look at the federal budget request for next year. There's hardly a corner of the world where a Peace Corps volunteers making a difference.

00:21:36.700 - 00:22:06.080

Right now you can join. They're opening hearts and opening minds, building bridges and bridging cultures, sharing skills and sharing themselves, bringing new life to desserts and fighting disease. Mhm Peace Corps is leaving behind more than a new crop, the new forest or a nourished child. It's leaving behind the people.

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You've helped to help themselves shaping their future as well as your own. No matter what your skill, you don't know how much you have to offer until you offer it. Take home a world of experience and leave behind something. It will last for generations. Peace Corps.

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The toughest job you'll ever love. You'll try to sleep, but it will come creeping into your mind and grow into a private horror of your own making. All because you're leaving your taxes for the last minute. Yeah, the tax laws have changed and tax forms are different.

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Don't let it haunt you. File now, file accurately and make your taxes less taxing. The president has to submit his budget plan to the nation every year. This time around, we got the budget a little later than we usually do. It was a good reason we've worked right up until Christmas last year to put together a two year deficit reduction plan.

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The stock market plunge last October brought Congress and the White House together, and we hammered out an agreement to cut the deficit by $76 billion. It was the biggest deficit cut in our history about the hardest work I've ever been involved in the new budget pretty well.

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Locks in spending limits We agreed to last year. The day after the budget came out. The Senate Budget Committee, which I chair, heard from the president's budget director, James Miller. All things considered, the president's $1.1 trillion budget proposal is the most realistic budget submitted since he's been in office.

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I want to begin by offering you my compliments for the work you did in putting together the administration's budget. I know you've invested a lot of effort trying to comply with the summit agreement, like those of us who were involved in last year's meetings. Remember the sweat, the time in the pain involved?

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And although we could have done much better, I suppose we can take some satisfaction in what was achieved. Tough as it was, the job facing the next president is going to make last year's looked like a walk down the primrose path. When he takes office, the new president will have to face the prospect of a $4 trillion national debt by the end of his term.

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It's the kind of debt that can smother our own economy and inflict serious damage is on the economies of the rest of the world, the huge debts and acts over everybody's neck. It means we have to operate under tough budget limits, and there's still a healthy concern that we haven't been investing enough in our future.

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It's an issue that was raised by Senator John Danforth of Missouri, a Republican member of the committee. Help me, But what is Is there concern within the administration on the possible under investment by both the public sector and the private sector? Uh, in the domestic side of our economy, Um, taking the spending side with the effects of the 1986 tax bill?

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Um, has there been any expression of concern within the administration that perhaps we are not investing sufficiently in, uh, in the future? Uh, let me say that within the administration, there's concern over that There's concern over the savings rate, a number of things that have to do with the, uh the, uh the effectiveness of our with which we put to our resources to use and the amount of resources that we have to invest.

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Um, these are concerns to us. Uh, it's a concern to all of us. But the committee kept coming back to what, certainly the biggest concern of all the relentless growth of the national debt. Senator Tim Wirth, the Democrat from Colorado. Ask about the problem, Mr Miller, what was the statutory debt limit when you all came to town in 1981?

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I do not know what the statutory debt limit was at that time. I can find for you the stop. I can find you. I can tell you what the debt held in public hands was. As of 1980 it was a little less than a trillion dollars $914 billion.

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And how much is it? How much is it? At the end of the president's five year plan? Um, at the end of 1993 we estimated to be three trillion, 654.0 billion. So, as I told the press after a White House meeting, the president's budget is a good faith effort.

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It seems to me he's done his best to stay within the spending limits. When the next president sends a budget to Congress, Ronald Reagan will be in California, and Lawton Child's will be in Florida and everyone in the nation will be living with the economic conditions found by the new president.

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We have an obligation to leave him some options in the ongoing fight against the deficit. It seems to me the best thing we can do is make this year's budget is realistic and honest as we can. I'm ready to work with the administration again. At the end of last year, we were bipartisan.

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This time we need to go a step beyond. We have to be no nonsense. And there's so much to do. Well, that's all we have time for today. I hope you'll join me again. Next time for the Lawton Child's update. Uh huh. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm, Yeah.

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Mhm. Yeah. Uh huh, Yeah, You. The Lawton Child's update looks at two University of Florida researchers who are working on regenerating spinal cords. Welcome news to the thousands of people paralyzed each year from spinal cord injuries. I'm Senator Lawton Child's. I hope you'll join us