medium · LSAT Reading Comprehension
A passage on neurogenesis explains why moving from animal studies to human clinical applications is "fraught with challenges." Generating new neurons, it stresses, is only the first step in a far longer sequence: the new cells must survive, migrate to the proper region, differentiate into the correct cell type, and then knit themselves into functioning neural circuits. Each of these later stages, the passage notes, can fail, and success in producing neurons therefore offers no guarantee that any therapeutic benefit will follow.
According to the passage, the transition from animal studies to human clinical applications is fraught with challenges because:
- Producing new neurons is merely the opening stage of an intricate process that also demands their migration, differentiation, and integration into circuits.
- Pharmacological agents effective in rodents are inherently toxic to the neural tissue of primates.
- The hippocampus is the only region of the human brain in which neurogenesis has ever been observed.
- Human brains have been shown to cease all neuron generation once a person turns eighteen.
- Funding for human neurogenesis trials has been steadily withdrawn over the past two decades.
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