Reynolds, Brent A., and Samuel Weiss

In 1992, Samuel Weiss, a neurobiologist on the University of Calgary Faculty of Medicine in Alberta, Canada, and Brent A. Reynolds, an oncologist, neuroscientist, and cell biologist who was then a graduate student studying under Weiss, stood stem cell research on its head. They discovered that conventional wisdom, which stated that adult stem cells had only a negligible ability to regenerate or repair themselves, was wrong. The implications of their discovery, which was published in Science that same year, has had major implications for developing stem cell drugs and therapies for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s. Weiss started the Hotchkiss Brain Institute at the University of Calgary, and Reynolds became part of the team at the McKnight Brain Institute at the University ...