Dr. Kevin Tracey

And so skip fast forward to the 1980s, as you said.

And well, actually, right after World War II,

In Pisa, Italy, a physiologist worked on an epilepsy model in his lab, I believe it was in cats, and showed that if he induced seizure activity in the brain of the cats and measured it by EEG, but applied electric current, just brief electric pulses to the vagus nerve of those cats, that it would stop the epileptic spikes.

So in the 1980s,

A Philadelphia neuroscientist patented that, cited that Italian's work in his patent, and led to the first clinical trials by a company called Cyberonics.

The first device was implanted by a neurosurgeon named Bill Bell, who was actually my chief resident when I was an intern here at the New York Hospital on neurosurgery.

And it turned out to have very significant benefit helping some patients who would go from having 10 or 20 or 50 seizures an hour to having none or very few.

I mean, putting some people who were homebound back at work and out –

And today we don't know why.

I pretty much just told you most of the science that we know about vagus nerve stimulation and epilepsy.

It seems to work in half the people, but we don't know why.

The other half that it didn't work in, back in the early days, the surgeons would say, well, this isn't helping you.

Patients like, you're not taking out my device.

Surprise, surprising the doctors.

And they asked why?

And the patient says, because I feel better.

It makes me happy.

Based on that, that led to...

clinical trials of using vagus nerve stimulation to treat treatment refractory epilepsy, sorry, depression patients, patients who are out of options with talk therapy, patients who are out of options with medical therapy.

And as it turns out, in years and years of work, it works again about 50% of the time, about half.