Nine years ago, Rusty Gage shattered a neuroscience dogma when he showed human brains give birth to new neurons. Today, a company is eager to take those findings to the clinic.
By Kerry Grens
ARTICLE EXTRAS
There were hints that serotonin might be involved. A year earlier, in 1998, Gould, now at Princeton, teamed up with her next-door laboratory neighbor, Barry Jacobs - known to some as Mr. Serotonin - to see if the neurotransmitter might have an effect on neurogenesis. They applied 8-OH DPAT, an agonist to the 5-HT1A serotonin receptor, or fenfluramine, which stimulates massive serotonin release. "And lo and behold we had loads of proliferation,"3 Jacobs says. Shortly following, two French investigators showed that depleting serotonin decreases neurogenesis in the hippocampus.4
At the same time Santarelli had begun work on a knockout mouse whose 5-HT1A serotonin receptor was lost. Though he had not published the work yet, Santarelli ...
