Mary Bartlett Bunge, who with her husband, Richard, studied how the body responds to spinal cord injuries and continued their work after his death in 1996, ultimately discovering a promising treatment to restore movement to millions of paralyzed patients, died on Feb. 17, at her home in Coral Gables, Fla. She was 92.
The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, a nonprofit research organization with which Dr. Bunge (pronounced BUN-ghee) was affiliated, announced the death.
“She definitely was the top woman in neuroscience, not just in the United States but in the world,” Dr. Barth Green, a co-founder and dean at the Miami Project, said in a phone interview.
Dr. Bunge’s focus for much of her career was on myelin, a mix of proteins and fatty acids that coats nerve fibers, protecting them and boosting the speed at which they conduct signals.
Early in her career, she and her husband, whom she met as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in the 1950s, used new electron microscopes to describe the way that myelin developed around nerve fibers, and how, after because of injury or illness, it receded, in a process called demyelination.
