A young scientist at Rockefeller tries to figure out what's going on in the brains of adolescent rats.
By Jenny Marder
4 years ago, Russell Romeo committed a small act of subterfuge. Without telling his boss, he ordered 60 white lab rats from an animal research facility in Harlan, NY, and had them shipped to his laboratory at Rockefeller University. They arrived, 10 to a box, on a crisp, cloudless Tuesday in March. He gave them a week to recover from the move. Then he started an experiment that would change the course of his career.
Romeo was only 31 at the time, and as a young neuroscientist working in one of the best stress research labs in the country, he was fascinated by recent research on the vast remodeling that takes place in the human brain during adolescence. Rats, Romeo felt, would provide a good model for better understanding ...
