Advancing knowledge of human development, developmental disabilities, and neurodegenerative diseases.
From his sixth-floor laboratory in the University of Wisconsin Waisman Center, Su-Chun Zhang, MD, PhD, has a unique vantage point on the second tower of the Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research (WIMR II), which is nearing completion.
Alexander disease is a devastating brain disease that almost nobody has heard of — unless someone in the family is afflicted with it. Alexander disease strikes young or old, and in children destroys white matter in the front of the brain.
Many scientists use animals to model human diseases. Mice can be obese or display symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Rats get Alzheimer's and diabetes. But animal models are seldom perfect, and so scientists are looking at a relatively new type of stem cell, called the induced pluripotent stem cell (iPS cell), that can be grown into specialized cells that become useful models for human disease.
The telegram from President John F. Kennedy to University of Wisconsin President Fred Harrington was both eerie and visionary. Eerie because it was delivered Nov. 20, 1963 – just two days before Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas – and visionary because it seemed to anticipate the challenges confronting science in its quest to explore the human brain.
GABA neurons are the brain cells whose degradation causes Huntington's disease, a condition characterized by severely degraded motor function, among other things.
Last fall, the Waisman Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison bid successfully for the same National Institutes of Health core grant that the late Harry Waisman first won 45 years ago.
Long considered to be little more than putty in the brain and spinal cord, the star-shaped astrocyte has found new respect among neuroscientists who have begun to recognize its many functions in the brain, not to mention its role in a range of disorders of the central nervous system.
When neurons started dying in Clive Svendsen's lab dishes, he couldn't have been more pleased.
There are many ways to die, but amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease must be one of the worst.
"Don’t give up, my love, or I’ll give up with you, because I only live to see the fulfillment of this dream: that you may continue to live. Yours is a life sentence, not a death sentence.”
