easy · LSAT Reading Comprehension
Researchers have confirmed that the adult hippocampus, in both rodents and humans, can generate new neurons. But moving this discovery from the laboratory bench to the clinical bedside has proved difficult. Generating cells is only the first step: to be therapeutically useful, the new neurons must survive, migrate to the proper location, differentiate into the correct cell type, and wire themselves into the brain's existing circuits. Any failure along this chain renders the new cells useless.
According to the passage, which one of the following is a major hurdle in translating adult neurogenesis into clinical treatment?
- Newly generated neurons must successfully travel to and become wired into the brain's established circuitry.
- Neurobiologists remain wholly unpersuaded that the adult brain is capable of any structural change at all.
- Humans, unlike laboratory rodents, possess no hippocampus in which any such replacement neurons could ever form.
- The specialized pharmacological agents required by animal models are far too prohibitively expensive for clinical use.
- New neurons cannot survive even a single day, perishing almost at once after generation in the adult brain.
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