Uncovering Earlier Work in Neurogenesis
Confused by this anomaly, Gould assumed she must have been making some simple experimental error, and she went to the Rockefeller library, hoping she could find explanation as to what she was doing wrong. (This all took place before the Internet.) She ended up looking through numerous dusty papers in the Rockefeller stacks. In one such science journal, buried there for 27 years, Gould found the explanation she needed, though not the one she was expecting. Several 1962 papers revealed the research at MIT by Joseph Altman claiming that adult rats, cats, and guinea pigs all formed new neurons. Altman’s results had been at first ridiculed, then ignored, and quickly forgotten. As a result, the field of neurogenesis had died before it could get started.
Further investigation by Gould revealed that a decade later Michael Kaplan, at the University of New Mexico, had used an electron microscope to image neurons giving birth. Kaplan had, he believed, discovered new neurons everywhere in the mammalian brain, including the cortex. Yet even with this visual evidence, science clung to Rakic's doctrine which denied the possibility of neurogenesis. Kaplan is reported as remembering Rakic telling him that “Those may look like neurons in New Mexico, but they don’t in New Haven.” Faced with the toxicity of this type of criticism, like Altman before him, Kaplan had abandoned his work in neurogenesis.
Read more about this topic: Elizabeth Gould (psychologist)
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