YOUTUBE, WORLDVIEW STANFORDStanford University neuroscientist Ben Barres, whose studies of glial cells documented their fundamental importance in the brain, died yesterday (December 27) of pancreatic cancer. He was 63 years old.
Barres is renowned for putting glia on the neuroscience map. Where once these cells where considered background support for neurons, Barres and his colleagues established their essential role in synapse formation and in response to acute injury in the brain.
“If you took the Barres lab out of the field of glial studies, there would be no field,” Martin Raff, a neuroscientist at University College London where Barres did his postdoc, says in a press release.
While an undergraduate at MIT, Barres took a course on the brain that inspired him to study the organ—both as a physician and researcher. First, he earned a medical degree from Dartmouth Medical School; then, while working part time as a neurologist, he completed a PhD in David Corey’s ...
