Research Notes

Neurogenesis Debate Continues Recent studies have all but confirmed the occurrence of neurogenesis in the primate hippocampus, an area involved in short-term memory. But occurrence of neurogenesis in the neocortex, an area thought to be involved in long-term memory, continues to be a point of contention. A group at Princeton University surprised many with an October 1999 report that suggested the neocortex was home to the birth of thousands of new neurons per day (E. Gould et al., "Neurogenesis

Written byEugene Russo

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"Neurogenesis in the neocortex of adult primates," Science, 286:548-52, Oct. 15, 1999). At last month's American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington, D.C., Yale University neuroscience professor Pasko Rakic, whose 1980s research suggested that primates are capable of relatively little neurogenesis compared with lower vertebrates, presented as-yet-unpublished data contradicting the Princeton group's findings. In a similar experiment, Rakic's group looked to the rhesus monkey neocortex for neurogenesis, but found only glial cells, not neurons. Rakic contends that the large turnover of neurons in regions of long-term memory simply wouldn't make evolutionary sense: Higher primates gave up that ability in order to retain decades of life experience. The Princeton and Yale groups plan to meet in the near future to exchange data and tease out the reasons for the discrepancies, which may have to do with how the targeted cells were labeled. Rakic remains particularly puzzled by the ...

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