About the same time, John W. Olney, M.D., a neuroscientist at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri who recently had been appointed to the National Academy of Science, noted that mice being fed MSG for a study of retinal deterioration had become grotesquely obese. Believing that the obesity was related to the function of the hypothalamus in the brain, he sacrificed MSG-fed mice and found that MSG caused hypothalamus lesions and neuroendocrine disorders, and that the very young were at particular risk. Neuroscientists now generally agree that glutamic acid is neurotoxic, killing brain neurons by exciting them to death.
