What happens when a scientist discovers something that contradicts what most people believe to be true? In this week’s Wednesday’s Women in STEM Series, we feature Elizabeth Gould, a behavioral neuroscientist, who discovered that neurons can regrow in adults and how she persisted when those before her said she was wrong.
Elizabeth Gould received her PhD in 1988 from UCLA in behavioral neuroscience. While she was working on her post doctoral research studying the death of neuron cells in the brain, she discovered evidence that these cells might actually heal themselves. At the time, most research pointed to the conclusion that brain cells in adults could not heal or regrow so she assumed she had made a mistake in her experiments. (Why is it that we often jump to the conclusion that we made an error instead of trusting our work?) She started looking into past studies to see what she did wrong and found a few other researchers that suggested the same thing. This went against what everyone considered to be true so no one believed these new studies that said adult brain cells could regrow.
Gould shifted her research focus from how neurons die to how they regrow and spent 8 years studying the brains of adult rats and primates to gain enough data to finally prove her hypothesis. Her data was so conclusive that the original scientist (a man!) who said she was wrong finally admitted that neurogenesis, the growth of new neurons, was real!
Elizabeth Gould is currently a professor of psychology at Princeton University where she continues to study the growth of neurons in both early infants and adult brains. Her perseverance and determination to prove her research was correct is an example for us all to continue pushing for what we believe in!