 Salk Institute’s Fred Gage Knows His New Neurons
Despite
the fact that the human brain is composed of some 100 billion
neurons, it’s always been easy to imagine that this number is
somehow fixed at birth—that we’re born with our full
complement of neurons and then it goes downhill from there.
Certainly these neuronal cells will not divide, as other cells do.
Not with their enormously extended axons, and tree-like dendrites
averaging a thousand synaptic connections each. So how would an
adult brain ever add new neurons, and how would it possibly wire
them successfully into such an unimaginably complex system?
Ever since the mid-1980s, with the
discovery of new neurons in the brains of adult songbirds, this
question of adult neurogenesis has been one of the most
controversial areas in biology. Among the issues neuroscientists
have struggled to understand is not just the how and why of this
neuronal birth and development in the adult brain, but how this
capacity might be enlisted and enhanced to repair trauma and
age-related nerve damage in humans...
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 Taking
Care of Business, 1995-2005
The
focus now switches from the bench to the boardroom, as it were, with a survey of
highly cited research in economics & business over the last decade. Using
figures from Essential
Science Indicators
Web product, Thomson Scientific’s
web-based evaluation tool and database, Science Watch presents the
most-cited institutions, authors, and journals in the field since 1995...
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