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      Developmental Neurobiology and the Natural History of Nerve Growth Factor

      Annual Review of Neuroscience
      Annual Reviews

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          Abstract

          I was invited to write about the discovery of Nerve Growth Factor and its relationship to developmental neurobiology. Rather than detail the life of NGF over the past 30 years, I wish to concentrate on what was the most attractive and also the most unusual feature in the investigation of NGF: that each finding has signaled a new turning point and opened up a new perspective. The story of NGF is therefore more like a detective story than a scientific enterprise, since science usually unfolds according to well-defined rules, along the route paved by previous findings. In retrospect, the previous experience with NGP holds out the promise that as many turning points still await us on the road ahead as we experienced on the road we have traveled so far. To me this is an encouraging rather than a depressing thought; the abrupt end of a scientific pursuit is more often synonymous with an intellectual dead end than with a goal successfully achieved. By way of introduction, I shall recount the early beginnings of this research, which are well known to old-timers but probably not to biochemically trained newcomers who were lured to take part in this game by the molecule itself and who are only vaguely acquainted with its natural history and with its problems.

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          Author and article information

          Journal
          Annual Review of Neuroscience
          Annu. Rev. Neurosci.
          Annual Reviews
          0147-006X
          1545-4126
          March 1982
          March 1982
          : 5
          : 1
          : 341-362
          Article
          10.1146/annurev.ne.05.030182.002013
          51640c3b-69a1-4711-8542-ba57b265b488
          © 1982
          History

          Earth & Environmental sciences,Medicine,Geosciences,Social & Behavioral Sciences,Physics,Life sciences

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