The progesterone story began as a scientific puzzle, obstinately pursued by a stubborn Emory neuroscientist.What caused some female rats to survive brain injuries virtually unscathed while males with similar injuries died or had severe problems finding their way around once familiar mazes?

Many colleagues thought Don Stein was too obsessed with a potentially career-killing research dead-end. Two Emory doctors—Art Kellermann, then head of emergency medicine, and David Wright, an ER clinician and researcher—looked at Stein’s findings in rats and thought that maybe, just maybe, the scientist was on to something that could change the too often dismal outcomes of the traumatic brain injury(TBI) patients they saw in the emergency department. Other Emory doctors and researchers stepped up to help them find out, in a clinical trial funded by the NIH, conducted from 2001 to 2005 at Grady Memorial Hospital, where TBI patients arrive with heartbreaking regularity.