On one of her first days at the University of Missouri, freshman Gabriella Garbero achieved campus-wide notoriety when her father Matt passed out in her dormitory.

He wasn’t impaired -- other than being dehydrated and not having eaten for most of the day, and having diabetes, which he found out about from that experience. The stress of helping his daughter get settled into college life probably also played a part.

Stem cells — immature cells with the potential to develop into different tissue types — have been heralded as a major advance for developing treatments for a variety of diseases. That’s true for diseases of the nerves and muscles, where such cells could potentially be transplanted into the body and either support or replace a patient’s ailing cells.

In the era of molecular biology, the drug development process has moved from a “let’s try it and see what happens” approach to a scientifically based process of discovery and application.

For many of the diseases in MDA’s program, drug discovery begins with gene discovery — identifying a gene that, when flawed, causes a disease.

It was 5 o’clock on a weekday afternoon. I was sitting on the corner of Montrose, a five-lane thoroughfare through downtown Houston, and Sul Ross, a little cross street between West Alabama and Richmond. The class I was taking at the University of St. Thomas had ended for the day, and I was waiting for my faithfully late METRO bus.

Research progress in spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) has been considerable in recent months.

It seems as if everybody wants information about you these days. Try to get that rebate the salesman promised on your new computer, and the company wants to know how old you are, how much money you make and whether you went to college.

Phone surveys want to know what you think of your congressional representative, whether you’re planning to sell your house and what radio stations you listen to.

Morgan Fritz has a clear idea what her role will be as the 2005 MDA National Goodwill Ambassador. "To talk a lot," she says with a smile.

But rest assured: The charming 6-year-old from St. Peters, Mo., knows exactly what to talk about when she and her family represent MDA and its clients nationwide this year.

Morgan will attend fund-raisers, sponsor gatherings and other events to spread the word about MDA and its mission, and will be featured in MDA national promotional materials.

*Note: In the print edition of Quest, this article was titled "Rounding Up the Usual -- and Not So Usual -- Suspects."

The scene is familiar to everyone who watches crime dramas. The safe has been opened, and the hotel guests' jewelry and other valuables are missing. What happened, and when, and who's responsible?

Some people have nightmares about falling off cliffs. Brad Williams has nightmares about falling — period.

“Whenever I’m walking, falling down is always the major thought on my mind,” says Williams, 39, of Alexandria, Va. “It has to be on my mind a lot for me to be dreaming about it.”

Williams has Miyoshi distal myopathy, a slowly progressive form of muscular dystrophy that primarily affects the extremities. He hosts an MDA Internet chat under the nickname “dysf,” and notes that other chat participants also have reported falling nightmares.