What the Marines needed was a successor to their Amphibious Assault Vehicle, or AAV, that debuted in 1972.

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Obviously, it would be preferable to mount that operation in vehicles that are faster and better protected than the 40-year-old AAV.

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He realized that the AAV could be used as factory inside the motor neurons to pump out large quantities of nourishing growth factors.

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Gene therapy scientists have focused on AAV recently as it is considered safer than many other viruses that had been previously used for gene therapy.

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In 2001, researcher Brian Kaspar in his lab noticed that the virus called AAV, which is often been used in gene therapy experiments, had an unusual property.

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But we're just describing to you what I'm looking at -- the charred AAV, an amphibious assault vehicle, is basically one of those armored personnel carriers the Marines are using.

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When it is injected into muscle, the AAV particles are sucked up by the hand-like protrusions connecting muscles with the nervous system, all the way back up into the spinal cord.

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The new gene therapy treatment, dreamed up by Salk Institute brain scientist Dr. Fred "Rusty" Gage, avoids this problem by using a harmless virus, called AAV, to deliver genes for the neurotrophic factor IGF-1 directly to the motor nerves.

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