This is the story of a man, who, by trying to help a little boy, helped himself and the world.

The story and Bogdana founder’s foray into medical research, which eventually led to his breakthrough the formula, would probably never happened had it not been for series of events in his wife's Bogda family.

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The year was 1968. Joseph Gruber's sister in law lived in a small town in Czechoslovakia, where she worked in a laboratory. She was pregnant, and when she gave birth to a baby boy, it soon became apparent that little Marcel was born with a problem, a rare tumor in the small of his back, which caused him to be partially paralyzed. His kidneys were not growing, and doctors in his small town predicted he would die within few months. As a last-ditch effort, they performed surgery on the boy, but in the process and from the use of radiation, his spine was severed. He was now paralyzed from his chest down, but he lived.

Grubers decided to bring little Marcel to the United States, a decision which was to be a drastic turn of events in all of their lives. “When I first saw him, I couldn’t believe he was four and a half years old,” recalled Joseph Gruber.  “He looked more like two, his teeth were discolored, and his feet were turned backward and upside down from atrophy.” But I don’t give up” said his uncle and his intense faith in the possibility of nerve rejuvenation led him to begin an intensive program of therapy for the little boy, a therapy which included love and prayers along with hours of physical therapy every day, and an electromagnetic stimulation of the severed nerves.  After nine months, little Marcel was able to walk, for the first time in his life, with braces and crutches. He had regained much of the feeling in his formerly dead muscles. 16 years after Gruber’s program began; Marcel was an example of a modern-day miracle. He should not have made it into his teenage years but at nineteen he was still walking with crutches, was able to drive a car and go surfing in nearby Malibu.

“I began to think about the rejuvenation at that time,” recalled Joseph. “I saw with my own eyes that nerves could be rejuvenated.” The experience led Joseph into what would become an almost obsessive investigation into a medical field. Why and how the nerves regenerate?  How had the intensive physical therapy turned Marcel’s life into a near miracle of recovery? Joseph began a personal study into the area of nerve and muscle rejuvenation and into endocrine system. He began to question the aging process itself and turned to medical discoveries that were virtually gathering dust on the shelves, while being largely ignored by the medical community.

For the next 15 years, Joseph Gruber devoted much of his time to medical research, and during that period, he developed a theory of aging which suggests, basically, that aging is a process that is brought about by a failure in our own bodies.

Because of their molecular makeup, the nutrients that go into our bloodstream are often too big to penetrate the cell membrane. But if nutrients are reduced, they can be absorbed.

“It’s possible that at age 150, an individual could be in the prime of his youth,” asserted Gruber. “There are quite a number of scientists who believe that our bodies could live to be 500 to 600 years old.”

Based on the premise that, if you can make a substance that will penetrate the cell membrane, you can reverse the aging process. “The theory” he admitted, “is either ‘right on’ or it’s no good at all. The point is that when I designed the formula, I designed it with this theory in mind. And, lo and behold, the first formula worked.”

By a freak accident, Joseph Gruber inadvertently became a test case for the effectiveness of this formula. Only a month after he had developed the formula and had been trying it on his face, one day while priming the fuel pump of the car, he became enveloped in a gasoline fire on his face, neck, and chest. He was rushed to the Sherman Oaks Burn Center, where he was hospitalized with severe burns for the whole month. After his release from the hospital, with the wound still open, because of infection that was not healing, he asked his wife to apply the formula to the skin. The infection disappeared and within 5 days the wound was covered with new skin. His hair grew back through the grafted tissue and today this face shows no evidence of ever having been burned.

In 1987, after additional studies, Joseph and Bogda decided to make the formula available to the general public under the name BOGDANA (meaning God has given in Slavic Language).

Note:  The September 1988 issue of Discover Magazine presented a comprehensive look at the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, which included the same electrical nerve stimulation treatment that Joseph Gruber pioneered with little Marcel 15 years earlier.

With modern medical breakthroughs in this area, it is possible that many people with disabilities caused by nerve dysfunction and consequent muscle atrophy may be treated in new ways that will allow them to function as whole physical human being once again.