Which scientist had the greatest impact in the past year? Mike Brown of Caltech forced astronomers to rethink what a planet is. Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago found a key fossil showing how life moved onto land. Emma Whitelaw of the Queensland Institute of Medical Research documented how heredity extends beyond genes. NASA's James Hansen bolstered the case for global warming and spoke out against government censorship. And these were just some of our finalists.

In the end we zeroed in on one researcher whose work stands out even in this illustrious company. We are pleased to announce Jay Keasling as the winner of DISCOVER's first Scientist of the Year award. Now meet the runners-up.

Runners-Up: John Donoghue
Neuroscientist at Brown University

Last year 25-year-old Matthew Nagle changed the channels on his TV, adjusted the volume, opened and closed a hand, and read an e-mail. These feats may not sound impressive, but they earned him a spot on the cover of the July 13, 2006 issue of the journal Nature (and caused a media uproar) because Nagle is a quadriplegic, paralyzed in 2001 by a knife wound that severed his spinal cord. Thanks to a system called BrainGate, Nagle was able to manipulate the TV controls, as well as a prosthetic hand, using his thoughts alone.


BrainGate, the most sophisticated brain-computer interface yet tested in humans, is being developed by John Donoghue, head of the Brain Science Program at Brown University, through a company he cofounded: Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems. In June 2004, Nagle became the first patient to receive an experimental implant in a part of his brain that

Courtesy of Glenn Turner, Brown University
controls hand and arm movement. The implant is a square silicon chip just four millimeters (about 1/6 of an inch) wide, studded with an array of 100 hair-thin electrodes. The chip sits on the surface of the brain, while the electrodes delve midway into the brain's two-millimeter-thick cortex to eavesdrop on neurons that normally signal muscles to move. A bundle of gold wires sends those signals out through a connector affixed to the top of the skull, and to an amplifier the size of a cigar box; they then travel by fiber-optic cable to a dishwasher-size cart of computers. During training sessions for BrainGate, the computer software learns to associate patterns of neural activity with the intent to move a hand in a particular direction; it can use those intentions to pilot a computer cursor or, if all goes as planned, a motorized wheelchair.

Donoghue remembers Nagle's first training session clearly. His team asked Nagle to imagine moving his arm and hand: first to the left, then to the right, to flex his wrist, or to open and close his hand. "To me it was just incredible because you could see brain cells changing their activity," Donoghue recalls. "Then I knew that everything could go forward, that the technology could actually work."

After three years of limb paralysis, it was by no means clear that Nagle's motor cortex could still signal his intentions in a meaningful way. Donoghue's work "profoundly shows that the signals in the part of the brain you'd need to operate these neuromotor prostheses exist years after a spinal cord injury," says neuroscientist Krishna Shenoy of Stanford University, who is working with the BrainGate sensor in monkeys. That finding, he says, along with the apparent safety of the implants, "has catapulted this entire field."

The eldest son of a bricklayer, Donoghue spent several years of his Arlington, Massachusetts, childhood in a wheelchair after developing a painful degenerative bone disease that ravaged his upper leg bones where they form the hip joint. It gave him some perspective, he says, "on what it means to be limited in your mobility and not able to do the things that the rest of the world is doing."

When he started his lab at Brown in 1984—after completing a doctorate there in 1979­—it was not to address mobility problems but to ask fundamental questions about the brain. How, for instance, does the brain translate intention into skilled movement? "I want to pick up my coffee cup, and my hand gets shaped and goes over there, picks it up, and grabs it. How does that happen?"

Recordings from just one, or even a few, neurons at a time in rats or monkeys weren't getting him close enough to the answer. So by 1992, he had begun looking for new technology that could detect the activity of many brain cells at once. He soon settled on a multi­electrode array­—now a component of BrainGate—developed by bioengineer Richard Normann at the University of Utah. Donoghue's original intent was basic brain research, but a powerful idea was taking shape among neuroscientists: coupling this type of sensor to an external device that could help the disabled.


About the size of an eraser tip,
Donoghue used this chip to
help a paralyzed man control
a computer with his mind.

Courtesy of Brown University
In 2002 Donoghue reported that he had successfully trained monkeys to move a computer cursor using only their thoughts. Now, with FDA oversight, his team has tested BrainGate in four human patients, including Nagle. Two suffered spinal cord injury, a third was paralyzed by a stroke, and a fourth has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease). Still, kinks remain. Nagle often took two to three times as long as an able-bodied person would to move the computer cursor, and its trajectory often zigzagged wildly. Technical problems have plagued the performance of some of the implanted electrodes. Using the BrainGate system also requires a technician to recalibrate and tweak the software. But the bulky, wire-trussed equipment represents just an early stage technology. The next step is to miniaturize everything, to automate the functions currently performed by a technician, and to transmit the signals wirelessly so that nothing pokes out through the patient's head.

One of the most exciting things, Donoghue says, will be to see people who are paralyzed control their own limbs again in a very simple way. "I'm almost certain I'll never see somebody playing piano," he concedes. "But feeding themselves, doing simple tasks, I'm hoping that that's one thing that would happen." He is already taking steps in that direction. Cyberkinetics recently teamed up with bioengineer P. Hunter Peckham, director of the Functional Electrical Stimulation Center at the Louis Stokes Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Peckham's team has developed a device that stimulates muscles patients can't control on their own—allowing them to use an arm, say, or extend their legs to stand up. Around 300 people are now implanted with these devices.

"I've had lunch with people with these things," Donoghue says. "You can pick up a Coke can and drink your Coke. Imagine your hand couldn't do anything, and now you can close it." Within five years, he hopes to couple that technology with BrainGate, allowing quadriplegics to move their limbs again, bypassing their damaged spinal cords entirely. In the meantime, he takes great satisfaction from seeing the effects of hope on patients like Matthew Nagle. "Think of the life that he leads and the fact that he got to be around technicians his own age. There was a lot of kinship, friendship there. That was really special."

—with additional reporting by Eric Jaffe

Read DISCOVER's exclusive interview with Donoghue when he won a Discover Award in 2004.

Check out an earlier article about Donoghue's research.