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Kipnis made a mention of this in an interview closer to the actual discovery: As to how the brain’s lymphatic vessels managed to escape notice all this time, K
by etiam 9y ago
Kipnis made a mention of this in an interview closer to the actual discovery:
As to how the brain’s lymphatic vessels managed to escape notice all this time, Kipnis described them as “very well hidden” and noted that they follow a major blood vessel down into the sinuses, an area difficult to image. “It’s so close to the blood vessel, you just miss it,” he said. “If you don’t know what you’re after, you just miss it.”
http://neurosciencenews.com/lymphatic-system-brain-neurobiology-2080/ http://neurosciencenews.com/lymphatic-system-brain-neurobiol...
- Flenser 9y agoconsidering the article also says: Lymphatic vessels are part of the body’s circulatory system. In most of the body they run alongside blood vessels. it's somewhat surprising (in hindsight I admit) that no-one thought to look for them there before.
- etiam 9y agoWho says no-one thought to look? But apparently only one person on record found them before. How about you have a peek at the research article, think away the colors from the antibody staining and see if you still consider it strange that it could go undiscovered. The things in question are appropriately measured on a micrometer scale, fragile to match and tightly tangled up with similar things inside jelly. And needless to say they don't come with helpful colored plastic hulls or developer defined object type annotation for inspection.
- Brammarb 9y agoI would imagine there are quite a number of blood vessels in the brain ...
- lr4444lr 9y agoThen what of the Italian scientist who noted them 200 years ago? All of those dissections and attention to research in the modern age and it was actually taught in medical school that the brain had no lymphatic system? Seems a little far-fetched.
- kingkawn 9y agoWelcome to medicine
- dwringer 9y agoThat reminded me of another example of this I remember seeing in the headlines; I'm not sure if this [1] is the one I'm recalling, but basically this is a similar situation for a different structure in the brain that was discovered in 1881 and then forgotten/ignored and omitted from medical texts for about a century. [1] http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/november/mystery-brain-imaging-112014.html http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/november/mystery-brain-im...
- efficax 9y agoWe still have a very poor understanding of the body. We're still discovering organs we didn't know we had: https://theoutline.com/post/851/scientists-identify-new-organ-in-the-human-body https://theoutline.com/post/851/scientists-identify-new-orga... It's entirely plausible to me that this has gone unnoticed for 200 years.
- mfoy_ 9y agoNo, they reclassified something they knew we had as an organ. Not like "whoa, what's this thing??".
- jerf 9y ago"Then what of the Italian scientist who noted them 200 years ago?" Two possibilities come to mind. First, he may have been studying a rare brain that had an enlarged system, and since he did not have preconceptions that what he found couldn't possibly be a component of the lymphatic system, he called it like he saw it. (It is also possible such brains were less rare back then or something. Many things have changed in our body's environments in the last 200 years. Random correlations abound.) The other is that perhaps he was simply wrong. He saw something that he identified as a lymphatic component but was in fact something else. Future people didn't make the same mistake so the observation sank without a trace. 200 years later, the real and much-more-subtle lymphatic system was found.
- 9y ago
- zellyn 9y agoThe "they're really close to the blood vessels; you could easily miss them" answers don't make sense. Surely any time you do brain surgery in the area beside those blood vessels, you'd be studying the area minutely?
- NamTaf 9y agoAnatomy textbooks aren't anything like real life. They're all colourful, clearly distinguished and clearly labelled, yet any autopsy will reveal a mess of reddish brown that tangles and squishes together. Also remember that human bodies aren't constructed, they're grown, so the idealised version of the textbook isn't what you end up seeing when you cut something open, and what you see when you do that changes each time you do that. It's why cadavers are still used to teach medical students.
- stult 9y ago>It's why cadavers are still used to teach medical students. And even practicing surgeons. Cadaver studies are hugely important for training surgeons how to implant new or new-to-the-surgeon medical devices.