Strong science challenges conventional wisdom: new perspectives on ovarian biology

Excerpt

Conventional wisdom, sometimes defined as "truth", is said to be based on evidence that may or may not be so. The same definition may apply to dogma. A wonderful aspect of the scientific community is that it is not afraid to challenge dogma. Johnson et al., in their 11 March 2004 paper in Nature [1], have provided compelling evidence for the existence of proliferative germ cells that give rise to oocytes and follicle production in the postnatal period of development of mice. Debates for or against ovarian germ cells for replenishment of the pool of oocytes were raised in the 1920 s, but additional studies led to "provisional dogma" of a fixed oocyte supply from the fetal period of life that came to be generally accepted for mammals by reproductive biologists and others in the 1950 s – reviewed in Ref. [2]. Johnson et al. [1] provide results from a systematically executed set of experiments that strongly indicate that: …