Brain, Vol. 124, No. 11, 2129-2130,
November 2001
© 2001 Oxford University Press
Editorial |
Regenerating myelin
Frenchay Hospital, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
Forty years ago, Mary and the late Dick Bunge provided the first unequivocal evidence that spontaneous myelin repair occurred in the mammalian central nervous system (Bunge et al., 1961
). Their observations had implications for neurobiology and for clinical neuroscience of immense and lasting consequence. First, they gave the lie to conventional neuropathological wisdom, which held that the CNS could repair only by scar formation, a general rule classically attributed to Ramon y Cajal (`everything may die, nothing may regenerate': an unfortunate attribution given that Cajal was largely summarizing others' positions, perhaps the better to emphasize the radical nature of his own experimental observations and conclusions, which proposed rather that the CNS did indeed possess some capacity for regenerative repair, but that this
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