Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds

What a way to oversell the discovery.

The reality is:

    * Different brain regions have different functions: ancient knowledge.
    * Different regions contain distinct cell types and molecular programs: also well established.
    * Anterior and posterior brain structures may trace back to fundamentally separate progenitor lineages that were independently specified very early in evolution and development: that's the interesting new result.

The headline should have been: "Human forebrain and hindbrain arise from distinct embryonic progenitor lineages" - not that we have "two organs" in the brain.

> They identified two different brain progenitor cells. One, which expresses a gene called Otx2, is destined to become the forebrain and midbrain. The other, which expresses a gene called Gbx2, is committed to forming the hindbrain. They showed that these two cell populations never overlap; they are mutually exclusive from the earliest stages of development.

Very cool. Never thought the brain could have two completely different ancestors

Related https://www.newscientist.com/article/2589739-our-brain-evolv... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755533

bioRxiv preprint July 2025 [0]

The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.

[0] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.02.662771v2

PDF is free to download.

We are going to have to deprecate an idiom or two. "I'm in two minds about something" now gives the wrong meaning.

I can see how one of these is the gut feelings origin, and other bodily feelings.

This isn't peer reviewed, just a press release. 10 other "papers" will be published in the next 2 weeks counterfinding anything in this post.

Science moves forward yet again with a few backward steps.