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From New Scientist magazine, 12 February 2000. Grow your own Great news, brain cells don't have to last a lifetime. We can always grow a few more. Alison Motluk explains FOR so long, it was an article of faith: adults don't grow new brain cells. Unlike your skin, blood and most other parts of the body, where old cells die and are replaced, the adult human brain simply doesn't get refreshed. The neurons you learned to walk with will be the very same ones you'll use to master the Zimmer frame. Even when researchers discovered that mice, birds and some monkeys routinely produce new brain cells in adulthood, the hardliners still clung to the notion that people were different. To protect all the things we learn and remember, we'd had to sacrifice that ability, they contended (see "Long memories", p 27). But now this orthodoxy has been overturned. In November 1998, Fred Gage of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California and his colleagues there and at the Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Sweden published proof that humans are not unique. We too are producing new brain cells well into adulthood (Nature Medicine, vol 4, p 1313). Full text: http://www.newscientist.co.uk/features/features.jsp?id=ns222520 |
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