Hey there! I'm Alie Astrocyte and in
this episode: how does government funding
affect research on a national scale?
My friend Andrea Hartzell, neuroscientist
and science policy fan, is here again
this week to talk about this topic.
Thanks Alie. As we talked about in our
last video, if you live in the United States
you've probably heard some of the
news about the president's proposed budget.
And this week we're focusing on
the proposed seven billion dollar cut to
the National Institutes of Health or NIH.
Cutting over twenty percent of the NIH's
budget will have a huge impact on
scientific research and technology innovation
in America for generations to come.
Government funding of scientific
research provides jobs, generates new
treatments and cures for diseases,
creates new technologies,
and fuels economic growth.
But how does that government funding
and NIH funding in particular
lead to these benefits for our society?
Where does that money go?
Last time, we visited with some UC
San Diego neuroscientists to learn about
how it impacts research at
one public university.
This week, we're hearing about
the effects of NIH funding on scientific
innovation from scientists across the country.
Let's meet our researchers.
Hi, I'm Brandon Cisneros and I create
methods to image the cells involved in
Type 1 diabetes. This is important
because detecting diabetes earlier
allows you to treat it earlier.
My NIH-funded research is focused on
trying to understand how neural circuits are
formed during the development of the
nervous system.
Neurological disorders can arise when
neurons don't make the right
connections during development.
And so it's important to understand
how this process happens normally
and how abnormal connections during
development lead to functional defects
My NSF/NIH-funded research focuses on
how our brains process sensory information.
Specifically, how it processes pain.
And this is important to help us understand
what goes wrong during pain disorders.
I'm mainly interested in how
lifestyle factors such as exercise and
nutrition impact the brain. I mean one
of the things we've learned in the last
20 years or so is just the incredible
efficiency of exercise of preventing
cognitive decline and
if we can understand how
exercise affects the brain promotes
enhanced cognition, it could have a
huge impact in communities.
I'm interested in how the brain
puts sights and sounds together.
So, if you see a bird flying overhead and
you hear its call, your brain makes this
decision where it says, "yeah that call is
probably coming from the bird." thing and
that's actually kind of a hard problem
for the brain to solve.
We often call it the binding problem.
I'm interested in how
populations of neurons work together
to help solve that problem.
Understanding how this works could
ultimately shed some light on conditions like
schizophrenia or autism where such kind
of sensory processing is often compromised.
I study the role of RNA
decay in brain development. And my
research is important if we hope to
understand the underlying cause of a
variety of neurological diseases.
Thanks to taxpayers and the NIH,
I research how learning and
memory change in normal healthy aging.
This is important because the
overwhelming majority, eighty-six percent
of people over 71, don't have dementia.
And for the other fourteen percent,
understanding how normal brain aging
works is really critical to understand
and treat age-related disease.
After I graduated from college, I received
a two-year fellowship from the NIH, which
allowed me to conduct full-time,
independent research. There, I studied
biological modifiers of normal aging,
which is essential for understanding
diseases such as Alzheimer's.
I study how childhood stressful experiences,
like poverty, abuse, and neglect, get under our
skin to affect our physical and our
mental health. Once we understand how
childhood stress affects health, we can
create individualized interventions to
improve health across the lifespan.
I study the cells in the eye that use
light, not to see the world around us,
but rather to synchronize our bodies to the
rise and fall of the sun. By better
understanding how lights affects behavior,
we hope to come up with new ways to help
shift workers and people that suffer
from sleep disorders and jet lag.
I work on a tumor called vestibular schwannoma,
which grows in the inner ear.
And so what I do is
develop drug therapies to stop
this tumor from growing so hopefully
patients won't have to get surgery.
I'm currently funded by a grant from the
National Cancer Institute, which is part
of the NIH.
My research is focused on cancer
metastasis, the dissemination of a
primary tumor cell to other organs
within the body. And this process is
responsible for ninety percent of deaths
linked to cancer. The goal of my research
is to better understand metastasis so
that we can find better ways to prevent,
diagnose, and treat cancer.
I study ways to prevent arsenic toxicity for
cells in the brain by manipulating RNA dynamics.
This is important because
arsenic is a common toxicant in the
water supply with serious consequences
for early brain development.
I study how calcium is regulated in cells,
which is really important because it determines
when cells turn on and off. And if
that's not regulated, we can get a wide
range of diseases from Parkinson's to
muscular dystrophy. I'm supported in my
research by an NIH training grant, so
government funding is very important
for me to continue my work.
My laboratory here at the Beckman uses
measures of brain electrical activity to try to
understand how people comprehend language.
We bring people into the
laboratory, put sensors on their heads
that will pick up the electrical
activity occurring in the brain, and we look
at how these strategies are different
across people in circumstances and also
how they change over the lifespan
as people age.
I study a subset of immune cells
essential to present our immune
system from attacking our own tissues,
regulatory t-cells. A deep understanding
of these cells, and the greater capacity
to manipulate them will allow us develop
new effective treatments for
Type 1 diabetes and transplant rejection.
The old saying, "you can't teach an old dog
new tricks" is not exactly a true
statement. And we're showing that every
day by studying how neurons communicate
with one another, you know, like,
at the synapse. A program that is funded
by the NIH, like the MD/PhD program
allows students like me to sort of
explore our interests and our own niche
that we can then take back to the public
so that we can develop new therapeutics.
I'm interested in learning how your
skeletal muscle affects the health of
your motor neurons, which are the neurons
that live in the spinal cord and reach all the
way out to every single muscle you can move.
This is really important because if we
find a way to convince your muscles to
maintain the health of your motor
neurons, it would be hugely beneficial to
people with motor neurodegeneration
conditions, such as ALS or Kennedy's
disease, for which there is still no
good therapy available. Cheers!
I'm currently using NIH funding
at this very moment to study
the process of adult neurogenesis, which
is the process of new neurons being born
all the time, even in the adult brain.
This is important because it's important
to understand the basic mechanisms of
brain plasticity if we're ever going to
improve brain plasticity in older adults
or people with diseases such as Alzheimer's.
Excuse me while I get back
to my experiment.
American biomedical research
spans a huge range of fields
and questions. But all of these
scientists in all of these places are
hard at work to better understand the
human body, and trying to translate that
understanding into real-world benefits
for American citizen.
Whether it's diabetes or cancer, this research
is important for supporting America's future.
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 that 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 to talk about this important issue.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for watching this episode of
Neuro Transmissions. If you liked it, please
hit that thumbs up button. And subscribe to
catch more videos about American
neuroscience. Until our next transmission,
I'm Alie Astrocyte. Over and out.