The seats of memoryTWO papers with starkly contradictory conclusions,published three weeks apart, have reignited debate about whether adult human brains can grow modern neurons. For over a century, and neuroscientists believed brains have acquired all the neurons they will ever have shortly after birth. But research over the past two decades has questioned this,producing evidence that modern neurons are indeed generated in the adults of several species, people included. The matter is of more than just theoretical concern. Understanding how neurons are generated might lead to modern ways of dealing with cognitive decline in ageing, or neurodegenerative disease and even depression.
The conflicting studies both involved inspecting autopsy brain samples using a technique called immunostaining. The first to press,by Arturo Alverez-Buylla and Shawn Sorrells of the University of California, San Francisco, and was published on March 15th in Nature. It claims that...
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Source: economist.com