In 1972, a British pharmacologist named Geoffrey Burnstock published a paper proposing that ATP is released from nerve terminals and acts as a neurotransmitter. The scientific establishment's response was a dismissal. The objections were that as the universal energy currency of all living cells, ATP was too ubiquitous to serve as a signal among neurons––it was everywhere, inside everything. That skepticism delayed a medical revolution by two decades. Burnstock continued wor

For more than a century, neuroscience has been built around a neuron-centered worldview. The heroes of this story are familiar neurotransmitters: dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, acetylcholine, glutamate, and GABA. Textbooks describe neurons communicating across synapses in brain circuits using these specialized chemical messengers. The vast ‘connectome’ network of axons and dendrites was believed to determine mental events. Neurons were viewed as the only true informatio