Reeve's advocacy helped him to soar

By the time he died, Christopher Reeve had at last "escaped the cape" — he had become bigger than the Superman character he portrayed on screen.

Reeve championed cutting-edge research into spinal cord injury, offering himself as a guinea pig for new therapies and vowing he would one day walk again. He never did. But his dream is now a plausible one for thousands of others who are paralyzed.

"The biggest hope is in biological research to allow the spinal cord to heal itself and even regenerate. That's just over the horizon but closer than ever before. Most people feel within the next 10 to 15 years, somewhere within our lifetimes," said Dr. Jack Ziegler, president of the American Spinal Injury Association.

Some even thought it would come in time for Reeve.

"I thought it was going to happen," said Dr. Doug Kerr, a Johns Hopkins University neurologist who works with stem cells — controversial research that Reeve advocated with superhuman strength even as he wheezed through a respirator from his wheelchair.

"It was Star Wars science fiction, this concept of rewiring the nervous system," but Reeve "thrust this field forward by leaps and bounds," Kerr said.

Reeve died Sunday after developing a serious bloodstream infection from a bedsore, a common problem for paralyzed people. He went into cardiac arrest Saturday at his home in Pound Ridge, N.Y., then fell into a coma, dying the next day at a hospital. His wife, Dana, and other family members were with him.

As an actor and a man, Reeve embodied strength and athleticism and performed his own movie stunts, including his 1978 starring role as Superman. It made him famous, but he longed to, as he often put it, "escape the cape" and take on other characters. He played a crippled Vietnam veteran in the Broadway play "Fifth of July," a lovestruck time-traveler in the movie "Somewhere in Time" and an aspiring playwright in the suspense "Deathtrap."

But real life — not a movie — gave him the best opportunity to shed the cape and show extraordinary human powers. Reeve suffered one of the most severe spinal injuries possible when he was thrown from his horse and broke his neck during an equestrian competition in May 1995.

Aided by access to the best medical care available, Reeve endured years of therapy to allow him to breathe for longer periods without a respirator while tenaciously seeking a cure that would allow him to walk again.