Human Neurogenesis

For this article, Jennifer Fisher Wilson interviewed Fred H. Gage, director of the Laboratory of Genetics at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif. Data from the Web of Science (ISI, Philadelphia) show that Hot Papers are cited 50 to 100 times more often than the average paper of the same type and age. P.S. Eriksson, E. Perfilieva, T. Bjork-Eriksson, A.M. Alborn, C. Nordborg, D.A. Peterson, and F.H. Gage. "Neurogenesis in the adult human hippocampus," Nature Medicine, 4:1313-7, November 1998. (Cited in more than 165 papers since publication) Because of a long-established fact that human brains simply cannot replace dead neurons, scientists considered brain damage irreversible and neurological disease in the elderly unstoppable. In the research reported in this paper, however, investigators demonstrated that adult human brains generate new cells after all. Since then, scientists have been furiously studying the implications, and research in this area has ...