Word: celling
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...path to overturning the dogma of the rigid brain was circuitous. In the early 1960s biologists discovered that new cells were being made in two areas of the adult rat brain, but the discovery was regarded as an unimportant peculiarity of the rodent brain and quickly forgotten. In the mid-1980s, Fernando Nottebohm of Rockefeller University brought new respect to the term birdbrain by demonstrating that the brain of an adult canary has the astonishing ability to regenerate new nerve cells at a rate of up to 20,000 a day. Other researchers reported similar regenerative ability in fish...
...cortex [an area important to higher intellectual functions], he or she may sustain it and develop quite normally. The exact same injury would put an adult in a wheelchair. I wondered if the source of the brain's apparent plasticity was at the level of the single cell...
Different kinds of blood cells, red and white, come from a single kind of stem cell in bone marrow. These chameleon-like stem cells transform themselves into whatever kind of blood cells the body needs. The skin and liver have their own stem cells. "Maybe there is a brain stem cell, a mother cell that gives rise to all types of brain cell," Snyder says he wondered. "I wanted to find this cell and harness it to repair injured brains...
Gage's finding--coupled with Snyder's report that same month of stem cells in the fetal human brain--has stood neuroscience on its head, so to speak. As has the latest finding, announced last month by researchers at Princeton, that adult macaque monkeys are constantly growing new cells in the highest and most complex area of the brain, the cerebral cortex. Snyder is now flush with confidence that neuroscience will ultimately cure many, if not all, diseases of the human brain. "By the year 2020 I hope we will have an active way of treating damaged brains...
...this is meta-neuroscience," says Snyder, laughing. "But I tend to think that the cells will take their cue from the host that houses them" rather than remembering their past lives like so many cellular Shirley MacLaines. So, in the case of brain-cell implants, it would seem, it is better to be the recipient than the donor...