The human brain looks like one organ. Its history may tell a different story. A Stanford Medicine study has found that the front and back of the developing brain arise from two separate populations of brain cells, following different developmental paths from the earliest stages of embryonic development.

The finding challenges a long-standing idea that the entire brain grows from a common pool of progenitor cells. It may also solve a problem that has frustrated researchers for years: why some of the neurons that keep us breathing and swallowing have been so difficult to grow in the laboratory. The study was published in Nature Neuroscience on September 18.

Two paths, One Brain

Long before a brain takes shape, its cells begin making choices about what they will become. The Stanford researchers found that one group of early cells, carrying the Otx2 gene, develops into the forebrain and midbrain. A different group, marked by Gbx2, develops into the hindbrain. The two groups do not merge.

They also carry different arrangements of chromatin, the material that packages DNA. Those differences help keep the cells on separate developmental tracks. The hindbrain is not a minor part of the brain. It contains the brain stem and controls functions that keep the body running without conscious effort — breathing, heartbeat, swallowing and other basic processes.

Its neurons are also involved in moving the muscles of the face, tongue and throat. Yet scientists have struggled to make these cells from human stem cells. The new study suggests they may have been starting from the wrong place.

“People are always focused on creating the final cell type, like the neuron,” said Rayyan Jokhai, a graduate student and co-first author of the study. “But it’s important to begin at the earliest stages of embryonic development.”

Brain Cells: From Stem Cells to Working Neurons

The researchers used what they learned about early development to guide human pluripotent stem cells toward a hindbrain fate. It worked. The resulting neurons produced electrical signals and carried molecular markers associated with hindbrain regions involved in facial movement and swallowing.

For researchers studying brain-stem diseases, having these cells in the laboratory could be valuable. In spinal muscular atrophy, motor neurons progressively deteriorate. ALS can damage motor neurons in both the forebrain and hindbrain. As the disease progresses, patients can lose the ability to swallow and, eventually, breathe.

Scientists cannot simply take brain-stem tissue from living patients and watch these neurons deteriorate. Lab-grown human hindbrain neurons could provide another option: researchers can study the cells, investigate what goes wrong and test possible treatments.

An Ancient Split

The story gets older when the researchers look beyond humans. They found the same two-origin pattern in chickens and zebrafish. They also found it in acorn worms, distant relatives of humans.

The pattern appears to reach back more than 550 million years. That suggests the separation is not a recent feature of the human brain. Instead, it may be a very old arrangement inherited from ancestors that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. The researchers propose that evolution brought two ancient neural systems together, eventually producing the integrated brain seen in vertebrates. In other words, what looks like one organ may have a much more complicated family history.

More than a story about brain evolution The finding could reshape how scientists make specialised brain cells in the laboratory. It may also open another line of research. The hindbrain contains neural circuits involved in hunger and appetite, raising questions about its role in metabolic disorders and treatments such as semaglutide.

For now, the Stanford team wants to trace the developmental origins of the spinal cord and understand how diseases such as SMA and ALS damage hindbrain neurons. The cells that eventually become parts of the human brain appear to make fundamentally different choices before there is anything recognisable as a brain. By the time the brain looks like one organ, its cells may already be carrying the history of two very different beginnings.

A new UN report asks us to rethink youth mental health not simply as a matter of individual symptoms, but as a question of the wider ecosystems in which young people live, learn and work.

There is a sentence in the middle of the United Nations’ new report on youth mental health that I have not been able to set down: “There is no ‘cure’ for being human”. Thriving, its authors write, does not mean the absence of hardship. It is a rare admission for an institution whose native idiom is targets and indicators, and it signals something larger than a change of tone.

Youth Mental Health & Well-being in an Uncertain World: A Global Call to Action, produced by the UN Youth Office and the United Nations University International Institute for Global Health and launched in September’s UN General Assembly, asks governments to stop treating young people’s distress mainly as a matter of individual symptoms. Instead it proposes an ecosystem model of 10 linked domains: governance, education, decent work, housing, climate, digital technology, peace, the arts, sport and spirituality. Each can tend or erode a young person’s life.

Youth Mental Health: The Sobering Global Figures

The figures are sobering. One in seven people aged 10 to 19 lives with a mental health condition, and half of these conditions emerge by 18. Suicide remains among the leading causes of death for the young, and close to three-quarters of the world’s suicides occur in low- and middle-income countries. Yet only 56% of countries have a child and adolescent mental health policy, against 81% with adult policies, and most spend less than 2% of their health budgets on mental health.

More telling than the numbers is the report’s philosophical turn. Drawing on Tyler VanderWeele’s flourishing research at Harvard, it insists that well-being belongs to the person and to her world at once: the tree and the forest must both be doing well. It speaks of relational well-being, of care, connection and community as the ground of collective health, and of each young person as, in some measure, the embodiment of her surroundings.

Flourishing Denied

African readers will recognise this terrain. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu; motho ke motho ka batho: a person is a person through other persons. Ubuntu has long held that personhood is not a possession but an achievement of relation, and that no self can flourish in a community that is failing. The report arrives, by way of Harvard, at a truth spoken in isiZulu, isiXhosa and Sesotho for generations. I welcome that convergence, and want to push it further.

In my own work I call this condition flourishing denied: the tearing of the relational webs that hold a life, from the household to the planet. Read this way, much of what we name youth mental illness is not, or not only, a malfunction inside the young person. It is an accurate registration of a world that has come apart around her. The report comes close to saying so. Citing UNICEF, it notes that six in 10 young people faced systemic challenges in the past year, led by economic instability and climate change, and that more than half lack hope for the future. UNESCO, it adds, has found an erosion of young people’s belief in their own futures, rooted in historical injustice. Despair of this kind is not a disorder of perception. It is, very often, perception itself.

This matters because the language of resilience, which the report uses generously, can return the burden to the young. We teach adolescents to regulate their emotions, to breathe, to cope, and then send them out into economies that have no place for them. Resilience is a virtue; it is not a policy. No young person should have to become heroically adaptable to survive conditions a decent society would not impose.

Nowhere is this clearer than at home. In the second quarter of this year Statistics South Africa reported youth unemployment of 47.4% among 15- to 34-year-olds, and more than a third of 15- to 24-year-olds were neither employed nor in education or training. The report cites South African research finding that between 21 and 24.5% of students live with conditions ranging from social anxiety to post-traumatic stress. Set side by side, these figures make the ecosystem model concrete. For many young South Africans, decent work is not one domain among 10; it is the load-bearing wall.

Hope In Its Pages

The report’s most consequential move is to anchor all this in human rights. It recalls the Secretary-General’s insistence that mental health is a right, not a privilege, and General Assembly resolution A/RES/77/300, which defines mental health not by the absence of a condition but by an environment in which dignity is respected. South Africa needs no persuading. Our Constitution guarantees access to health care, adequate housing and a basic education, and an environment not harmful to health or well-being. The report offers a way to read these guarantees together: a student’s panic attack in an overcrowded residence may be a housing question, a safety question and a labour-market question.

There is hope in its pages too. Much of the report’s texture comes from youth-led initiatives, many of them African: peer-support circles, restorative justice networks, arts-based healing, digital helplines. Young people are already building the ecosystems that states have been slow to fund, and the report rightly insists that they be co-authors of the response, not its beneficiaries.

A call to action is only as good as the action it calls forth, and the report is candid that policies on paper have not yet become services on the ground. Its model is a map. What South Africa needs now is the political will to walk it: to budget for mental health, to design labour, housing and education policy with young minds in view, and to resource the young people already doing the work.

There is an isiZulu word I return to often: ngisazophumelela, I will yet succeed; I am still becoming. It is not a statement of certainty but a grammar of persistence, a future tense spoken from inside difficulty. The question the UN has put to us is whether we will build a world in which it can come true.

Disclaimer: Prof Bohler-Muller writes in her personal capacity and does not necessarily represent the views or position of the University of the Free State. 

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is facing its largest-ever Ebola outbreak, with more than 8,000 cases reported, according to health authority data published on Monday. The World Health Organization (WHO) has called for faster access to medical care as delays in treatment continue to contribute to deaths. While transmission has begun to decline in some areas, the number of cases remains high, WHO officials said.

With 8,067 confirmed cases and 3,901 deaths, the case fatality rate is more than 48 per cent in 63 affected health zones in seven out of DRC’s 26 provinces. “While we are beginning to see a reduction in transmission in some areas, the number of cases remains high for this outbreak,” Dr Janet Diaz of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme told reporters in Geneva. WHO and its partners have expanded Ebola treatment facilities across the affected regions.

Treatment capacity has increased from only a handful of beds at the beginning of the outbreak to more than 1,600 beds across 50 treatment centres in seven affected provinces. Authorities plan to increase the capacity to more than 2,000 beds. Nearly 400 health workers have also been trained as part of the response, with a training hub established in Bunia. Health workers are particularly important in Ebola treatment because patients require specialised care and close monitoring. “Every patient bed requires a skilled workforce to provide safe, quality care around the clock,” Diaz said.

Erupting Violence Amid Health Concerns

Amid the growing Ebola crisis,Aid teams have raised concerns about the situation at Kigonze displacement camp in Bunia, in northeastern Ituri province. According to reports, soldiers entered the heath camp searching for weapons and people suspected of links to non-State armed groups. Gunshots were also reported. The violence has added another challenge to efforts to control the Ebola outbreak, as displacement can make it harder for people to access healthcare and for response teams to trace and monitor cases.

According to the UN aid coordination office, OCHA, the camp hosts nearly 19,000 displaced people. Residents have faced “armed violence, threats and intimidation against civilians, arrests, forced displacement and the destruction of shelters”, the Office said. Echoing those concerns, UN Humanitarian Coordinator in the DRC, Damien Mama, said that many families had left the site to seek refuge with host families.

Mr. Mama also stressed that the civilian character of the site must be preserved and that families “who have already lost everything” must be able to find safety and dignity where they have find refuge. The dispersal of families also raises serious public health concerns, as Kigonze is among the sites covered by the ongoing Ebola response.

In Need of an Efficient System

Oxygen is another major challenge. It is an important part of supportive treatment, particularly for patients suffering from severe Ebola disease, but remains unavailable or unreliable at many health facilities, especially in emergency settings.

According to WHO, improving oxygen access requires more than supplying cylinders and equipment. It also depends on reliable infrastructure, trained healthcare workers and systems capable of delivering oxygen to patients when and where it is needed. There is currently no approved vaccine specifically for Ebola Bundibugyo virus, although vaccine trials are underway.

WHO has allocated 20,000 doses of the Ervebo vaccine for a research vaccination programme in Ituri province. The vaccine has previously been used against Ebola Zaire virus. WHO and its partners continue to focus on early detection, rapid referral, supportive treatment and improving access to healthcare as they work to contain the outbreak. “Delays in seeking care, together with challenges in access and referral, continue to complicate the response,” Diaz said.