The Restorative Brain
Dr. Anne Foerster in the lab
This website introduces the neuroscience discoveries of Dr. Anne Foerster. In four decades of experiments, beginning in the 1970s, Dr. Forester has found that the brain has an astonishing capacity to heal itself from injury. Her stunning photographs of rat brains show neurons and other cells collaborating to recover from a cut in the brain, grow around the cut, and restore their function. The brain is smart, she finds, and knows how to survive!
Dr. Foerster’s method includes a special cutting device and a staining technique that identifies the myelin, the fatty sheath that grows around living axons, and other cell activity. She began this research at the Thomas C. Jenkins Department of Biophysics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, developed it in her PhD research at the University of Toronto, and continued at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, where she maintains a lab.
Diagram of rat with cutting device inserted into brain.
Dr. Foerster’s work has not received a warm welcome in the scientific community, where the orthodox view remains that the brain is inert and cannot reconstruct itself.However, recent research in neuroscience identifies many mechanisms that promote axonal growth and recovery, corroborating Dr. Foerster’s findings and beginning to explain why healing occurs.
Dr. Foerster wants her discoveries to inspire people who are themselves recovering from brain injury, others who are interested in healing, fellow scientists, and artists.
Technician Michael Holmes and Anne Foerster
Dr. Foerster is alive and well and still working. This site is built with her permission by her daughter, Laura Marks.