easy · 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 only the first step of an intricate process that further requires their migration, differentiation, and integration into circuits.
- Pharmacological agents proven effective in laboratory rodents prove inherently toxic to the delicate neural tissue of both human and nonhuman primate species.
- The hippocampus remains the single region of the human brain in which adult neurogenesis has, to the present day, ever been reliably observed by researchers.
- Human brains have been conclusively shown to cease all new neuron generation permanently once an individual person passes the age of eighteen years.
- Funding for promising human neurogenesis clinical trials has been steadily and deliberately withdrawn over the course of roughly the past two decades.
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