Prof.  Peter G.H. Clarke

Département de Biologie Cellulaire et de Morphologie

Universite de Lausanne

Rue du Bugnon, 9

CH-1005 Lausanne

Suisse



Phone: +41 21 692 5120 

Fax: +41 21 692 5105

email : Peter.Clarke@unil.ch

Neuronal death in brain development

Most of my carrer has been devoted to the development of the brain and the neuronal death that occurs naturally during brain development. Among my main discoveries have been:

• The occurrence of transient connections in the immature brain and their subsequent loss (working in W.M. Cowan's lab in 1975).
• The fact that neuronal death can be responsible for the loss of the transient connections, although in some situations the axons are eliminated without the cell body dying (initially in W.M. Cowan's lab in 1975, then with Marina and Stefan Catsicas around 1985-87).
• The role of anterograde signals in regulating the neuronal death, in addition to the well known role of retrograde signals from the axonal target (initially in W.M. Cowan's lab in 1975, then with Marina Catsicas around 1990-92).
• The occurrence of retrograde death signals in addition to the well known trophic life signals (with Yves Péquignot, Marie-Pierre Primi and Andrès Posada in the 1990s).

Intracellular mechanisms of neuronal death

I have also been interested in the events that occur within a neuron as it dies. In this area my main contributions have been:

• To combat the dogmatic view that all is apoptosis or necrosis.
• To propose a threefold classification of cell death occurring in normal development.

WebMaster, September 1999. Last update : November 2005.