Hey there!
Welcome back to Neuro Transmissions.
I'm Alie Astrocyte and
this week, we're talking about how
government funding impacts neuroscience
research at one research university.
To help with this I'd like to introduce my
friend Andrea Hartzell, a PhD candidate
at UC San Diego and
an avid science policy wonk.
Thanks Alie.
If you live in the United States,
you've probably heard some of the news
about the president's proposed budget.
Namely how many resources his
budget proposal would eliminate.
One of the things that stood out
to the Neuro Transmissions team was
the 5.8 billion dollar cut to the
National Institutes of Health, or NIH.
And then more recently another 1.2 billion
dollar cut effective immediately.
These cuts represent over twenty percent of
the NIH's annual budget and has huge
ramifications for America scientific and
technological future.
Government funding of science research
is critically important. It provides jobs,
leads to the creation of new technologies,
helps us understand human biology,
allows for the development of treatments and cures
for hundreds of debilitating diseases
and fuels economic growth as the
discoveries lead to real world applications.
A cut of this magnitude
will damage American scientific research
for generations to come.
But what might not be obvious is
how government funding
and NIH funding in particular lead
directly to things that benefit our society.
So if you're American taxpayer,
you might wonder,
"where does that money go?"
Well, we talked to some scientists at
UC San Diego to find out.
I use NIH funding to turn
human skin cells into brain cells
that I can grow in the lab.
This is important because it allows me to study
horrible diseases like Alzheimer's disease
using real samples from humans
just like you.
My laboratory uses
NIH funds to understand the
neural circuit level mechanisms of
drug action. By distinguishing the
neuronal targets of drugs that lead to
their therapeutic benefits from
those that produce unwanted side effects,
we hope to develop non addictive painkillers
and better treatments for Parkinson's disease.
I study a group of proteins that cluster
together and cause cell damage during
diseases like Parkinson's and
Alzheimer's disease, as well as ALS.
And in particular, I look at the genes that
influence this protein clustering
and how that damages cells in order to
develop more effective therapies to
treat these diseases.
I study the neural mechanisms
responsible for the behavioral
and perceptual effects of hallucinogens.
In addition to being important for
determining better approaches for
combating some of the harms
associated with drug abuse,
these drugs also serve as an avenue
for studying some of the more serious
symptoms associated with
psychiatric illness, such as hallucinations
and delusions, and how we may
better treat these in the future.
We work on uncovering brand new
mechanisms that underlie
nerve cell death in the aging brain.
Our lab, and our NIH money,
strives to find the mechanisms
that underlie these causes of neurodegeneration
in the aging mammalian brain.
I look at a particular type of brain cell
in the visual system. And I also study
how this type of brain cell receives
and interprets information.
And this is important because they are known
to play a huge role in
neurological and psychiatric diseases and
disorders such as epilepsy and schizophrenia.
My job as a computational researcher
in this field to help every other scientists
in the field understand whether or not their
data is correct and also to build tools
to help them understand what's going on
with their results faster and cheaper
than they could do by themselves.
I study how people use visual information in
attention and memory, and how that
information is represented in the brain
using signals measured with fMRI and EEG.
Data from our lab can help us understand
disorders of perception and attention,
such as in schizophrenia or ADHD,
but it also can help us understand
how people see in the everyday world.
So the core of my research is really a desire to
understand how memories are formed,
encoded, and stored within the brain.
These types of questions are very
important to be asking in order to
understand a variety of neurological
conditions, but really even to understand
typical cognitive processes,
such as memory loss that happens
with normal aging.
We know now because of NIH funding
that an extra copy of a gene
on this chromosome is responsible
for Alzheimer's disease in people with
Down syndrome. We have this clue
that we're going to be able to use
that helps us treat,
and ideally prevent Alzheimers disease
in people with Down syndrome
and we think that same clue is going to
help all the rest of us avoid dementia.
I study the blood vessels in the brain
and spinal cord.
And those blood vessels
are actually very different from those
in the rest of your body, in that they
really tightly control what can get from the
bloodstream into your brain and spinal cord.
Scientists don't know much about
how the blood-brain barrier breaks down.
And we think understanding this is
really important because if we know
how it breaks down, we might be able to
help rescue some of the later symptoms
of MS and stroke and epilepsy and TBI.
In our lab, we study how animals
perceive the world and we study
specifically how different
neurons are helping the animal
perceive the world.
I'm a graduate student
studying how the visual system is wired up.
So understanding the principles of
these wiring patterns has implications
not only for understanding how vision
and attention works, but also for
understanding what goes wrong
in disorders like autism and ADHD.
I've been here for 45 years,
continuously supported during that time
by the National Institutes of Health.
I study brain brain plasticity.
Brain plasticity is the ability of the brain
to change in response to the environment.
We think that this kind of plasticity
could underlie various mental health problems.
So we're really focused on this to try
to find ways to treat people
with these difficulties.
In addition to funding individual
research projects, the NIH
also funds programs such as the Medical
Scientist Training program,
where students such as myself receive
training as both a medical doctor,
as well as a research PhD.
This unique dual degree program
provides us with training in
both the clinic and in the lab in a
wide variety of diseases.
From mental illness, to ALS.
My research studies a gene that
actually turns on in the brain when
we learn and remember new experiences.
More importantly, this gene that I study
is disrupted an autism spectrum disorder.
So we think that by studying it,
it might reveal therapeutic avenues that
could help patients with autism spectrum disorder.
I'm not a scientist but I have
the privilege every day of working with
graduate students and faculty who are
doing amazing work on treating
many disorders of the brain
Our graduate program receives funding
from the NIH to support
medical research, and without it,
early diagnosis, treatment, and potential
cures for these diseases will be delayed
and severely impacted.
My lab is mainly funded by the NIH
and we study fundamental mechanisms
of learning, which have implications
in neural disorders such as
Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.
We work on trying to understand how
the function of our brain changes in
response to our experiences.
This is incredibly important biology
because it's involving everything we do
on a daily basis.
And it's dysregulated in many
neurological disorders and psychiatric disorders.
My lab studies rare disorders that affect
brain development. And we understand the
genetic mechanisms and try to find
genetic modifiers to change
the outcome of this.
Companies can't do this.
The disorders are two rare, there's no market
and the outcome is too uncertain.
For these families, NIH is their hope.
All of this research is happening at just
one public university. And as you can see,
it's all pretty important in unique
and fascinating ways.
The work being done by NIH funded
scientists here at UCSD has
the potential to prevent Alzheimer's disease,
understand autism, or
prevent multiple sclerosis.
It's hard to argue that those things wouldn't
benefit our society.
We need to come together as a
society to tell the government that cutting
NIH funding is absolutely unacceptable.
This research is critical to
our nation's future and it must be protected.
If you'd like to help, here are
a few things you can do.
First, call your representative
or send them a letter
and tell them not to approve any budget that
cuts NIH funding.
Then, share this video around your communities
to help others learn about how
important NIH funding is.
Finally, if you can,
consider donating to an organization
like the Foundation for the
National Institute of Health, a non-profit
organization dedicated to supporting the
NIH's scientific mission.
Check the description below for
resources on how to contact your representative,
an example calling script you can use,
and a link to the foundation.
Andrea, thanks for joining us today to
talk about this important topic.
Thanks Alie!
Thanks for watching.
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protect science in the United States.
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Until our next transmission,
I'm Alie Astrocyte.
Over and out.