Neural Cell Specification: Molecular Mechanisms and Neurotherapeutic Implications

The last decades have witnessed a radical change in our views on central nervous system damage and repair. This change is not only due to the emergence of new powerful tools for the analysis of the brain and its reactions to insults, but it also reflects a conceptual change in the way we approach these problems. As an illustration to this development, it is instructive to go back to the proceedings of a meeting at the NIH in 1955 edited by William F. Windle, which summarizes the disillusioned and pessimistic view on CNS regeneration prevailing at the time. While this generation of researchers were well aware of the issues at stake, they felt they had reached the end of the road; the approaches they had pursued had got stuck and the tools available could not take them any further. I can very well imagine that the participants, most of them leaders in the field, left that conference feeling they had heard their field being sentenced to death.