Word: salk
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Until Fred Gage came along, brain scientists accepted as a matter of faith that the neurons, or brain cells, you were born with were all the brain cells you would ever have. Then, two years ago, this 49-year-old neurobiologist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., showed in a groundbreaking experiment that neurons are constantly being born, particularly in the learning and memory centers. Gage's discovery forced scientists to rethink some of their most basic ideas about how the brain works...
...number of things we know now that we didn't know 10 years ago is not very large," laments Charles Stevens, a memory researcher at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif. "In fact, in some ways we know less...
...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...
Fleming serves well as a symbol of all the great medical researchers, such as Jonas Salk and David Ho, who fought disease. But he personally did little, after his initial eureka! moment, to develop penicillin. Nor has the fight against infectious diseases been so successful that it will stand as a defining achievement of the century...
Elsewhere, researchers are looking at ways to hasten the healing permitted by these antibodies. Peripheral nerves outside the cord heal themselves all the time, thanks to regenerative bodies called Schwann cells. Scientists at the Salk Institute in San Diego and at the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis at the University of Miami are experimenting with harvesting Schwann cells and transplanting them to the site of a spinal injury, where they can serve as a bridge across the wound...