Neural Transplantation

Neural transplantation is a surgical technique that has widespread applications in modern neurobiology. Although there have been sporadic attempts at transplanting neural tissues into the brains of adult mammals since the late nineteenth century, the conditions for achieving reliable transplantation were only characterized in the 1970s. As the techniques become more reliable, and as more is learned about the mechanisms of graft function, the techniques have found more widespread applications over the last decade. This interest has been fuelled further by the success of several clinical trials of neural transplantation in Parkinson’s disease (Olanow et al., 1996), offering prospects of radically new therapies being developed for a range of debilitating neurological diseases of the human central nervous system (CNS).