As Nature Neuroscience celebrates its 25th anniversary, we are having conversations with both established leaders in the field and those earlier in their careers to discuss how the field has evolved and where it is heading. This month we are talking to Rusty Gage, who is the Vi and John Adler chair for Research on Age-Related Neurodegenerative Disease and Professor of Genetics at The Salk Institute. He is known for his work on neurogenesis in the adult brain and on modelling diseases using human stem cells.