The Stevens and Barres study, published in the journal Cell in 2007, documented one of the most arresting instances of repurposing in biology: a protein designed to ticket germs and junk for destruction had been co-opted by the nervous system to ticket synapses for destruction. "It reinforces an old intuition," my psychiatrist friend Hans, in Boston, told me. "The secret of learning is the systematic elimination of excess. We grow, mostly, by dying."
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