The possibility that they might be important in nerve
cell development intrigued neuroscientists Fred Gage and Tomoko Kuwabara of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, and colleagues, who were studying how adult neural stem cells differentiate.
Ron McKay and his colleagues at the National Institute of Neurological Disease and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland, usually focus on brain
development, but they were
intrigued by recent papers reporting that some pancreas
cells express nestin, a protein typical of developing neural
cells.