BrainBlog

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal ran a feature article about neuroscientist Donald Stein and his career exploring facets of recovery from traumatic brain injury (TBI): One Doctor's Lonely Quest To Heal Brain Injury After 40 Years, Skeptics Back Hormone Therapy; Experiments in a Trailer By THOMAS M. BURTON September 26, 2007; Page A1 [snip] Dr. Stein still wanted to figure out why those brain-injured rats seemed to recover. But he says he concluded that he wouldn't win tenure if he pursued the question. In 1966, with a wife and young child to support, he left MIT to take a job as a psychology professor and director of the brain-research lab at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. His growing interest in the possibility of recovery from brain injury put him in a tiny minority. Most neurologists at the time still agreed with Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal , who wrote in 1913, "In the adult brain, nervous pathways are fixed and immutable. Everything may die, nothin...