Word: gage
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...believe in brain damage though. Take Phineas Gage, for example. On the morning of Sept. 13, 1848, Gage, a construction foreman for the Rutland & Burlington Railroad, was preparing a powder charge for blasting rock when it accidentally exploded, sending a 3-ft. 7-in., 13-lb. iron tamping bar straight through his skull. Gage fully recovered and lived for 12 more years, but his personality changed. He became an extravagant, antisocial, foulmouthed, bad-mannered liar. And apparently he'd been a pretty nice guy before the accident...
This I buy. Gage, by dint of significant trauma to his frontal lobes, did actually become a different person. But short of being shish-kebabbed on a tamping iron, I'm skeptical...
...adult brain had stem cells, they'd never yield new neurons. Now the scientists have at least two options to consider. They can train stem cells to produce nerve tissue in a petri dish and then implant the new tissue in an ailing brain. Or, as Fred Gage at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., suggests, they can tweak the brain's stem cells to start churning out new neurons. If you could do that, Gage says, "it would take away the controversy over embryonic research...
...mounting. Over the past three years, researchers have discovered that brain cells regenerate in primate-like tree shrews, marmoset monkeys and rhesus monkeys, all of which are closer to us on the evolutionary scale than are mice (except in Kansas). The real payoff came late last year, when Fred Gage at the Salk Institute and his colleagues in Sweden reported that nerve cells are regenerated in the human hippocampus (a portion of the brain related to memory and learning...
...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...