Word: braining
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...doesn't take an Einstein to recognize that Albert Einstein's brain was very different from yours and mine. The gray matter housed inside that shaggy head managed to revolutionize our concepts of time, space, motion--the very foundations of physical reality--not just once but several times during his astonishing career. Yet while there clearly had to be something remarkable about Einstein's brain, the pathologist who removed it from the great physicist's skull after his death reported that the organ was, to all appearances, well within the normal range--no bigger or heavier than anyone else...
...analysis of Einstein's brain by Canadian scientists, reported in the current Lancet, reveals that it has some distinctive physical characteristics after all. A portion of the brain that governs mathematical ability and spatial reasoning--two key ingredients to the sort of thinking Einstein did best--was significantly larger than average and may also have had more interconnections among its cells, which could have allowed them to work together more effectively. While the case is far from proven, says Dr. Francine Benes, director of the Structural Neuroscience Laboratory at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., "it's a fascinating discovery...
...notion of repairing disease-damaged brains with replacement cells is among the most talked-about--and the most audacious--ideas in modern neuroscience. Until now, however, that audacity has been limited to illnesses that attack narrowly circumscribed parts of the brain: the substantia nigra, for example, whose destruction causes Parkinson's disease...
...paper in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that neuroscientists may be getting a little more daring. A team of researchers reports that they've managed to reverse a neural disorder in mice that affects not just a single region of the brain but the entire organ. The genetically based disease prevents the formation of myelin sheathing around nerve fibers. Without that insulation, signals go awry and the mice develop tremors (similar to what happens to humans with multiple sclerosis...
Just what cued the stem cells to respond in precisely the right way is unclear, but the fact that they did respond suggests that a different brain disorder might have produced a different, equally therapeutic result. If that's so--and, more important, if it turns out to work in humans the same way it does in mice--then neuroscientists may someday have a brain-repair tool kit of astonishing versatility and power...