On a Wednesday morning in November, the last day of the 2023 Society for Neuroscience meeting, Maiken Nedergaard sat on a small stage at the front of a dimly lit convention-center ballroom. Occasionally, she sipped from a bottle of Diet Coke as she waited to be introduced as the first of four speakers in a session on the brain’s lymphatic and glymphatic systems.
Presiding over the session was moderator Helene Benveniste, a physician-scientist at Yale University who studies fluid flows in the central nervous system. Nedergaard didn’t need much of an introduction, Benveniste told the audience. The Danish neuroscientist is well known for her research on “glymphatics” — a term she helped coin more than a decade ago to describe a network of channels that, she and colleagues have proposed, carry cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) to and from the brain to wash away waste products.
Benveniste called Nedergaard “the inventor of the whole idea” behind the glymphatic model. “You can’t,” she said, “get this information from anyone better than Dr. Nedergaard.”