"My name is Nader Pouratian and I'm a Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at UCLA.
The name of my lab is the Neurosurgical, Brain Mapping and Restoration Lab.
We are primarily focusing on Parkinson's Disease at this point and the reason for that is because
Parkinson's Disease affects such a large of the population and it's a very disabling disease.
It's also a disease that we do surgery for.
There's brain surgery for it and we do a surgery called Deep Brain Stimulation surgery and
so our goal is really to use the operation room as a laboratory as a source of information
and data so that we can understand the the treatment that we do, understand how we improve
Parkinson's Disease and then hopefully use that knowledge to apply it to other diseases
as well like Depression and chronic pain and other psychiatric diseases.
What's happening is that blue box above the patient's head is what we call a micro drive
and we're controlling it with this remote control here and we're advancing the micro
electrodes 200 microns at a time so one-fifth of a milimeter at a time.
So we're basically mapping out our path to the target.
Then once we have that confirmed we will swap out that electrode with this permanent implant
here.
Once we have this in we'll get x-rays, make sure we are where we think we want to be and
then we'll test the patient as well.
That's why we have the patient awake during the surgery.
So I grew up right here in Los Angeles and have spent much of my life at UCLA.
So I did my Undergraduate degree here at UCLA in neuroscience.
I'm a scienist because the idea of asking questions and trying to understand how things
work is very intrinsic to me.
That's just how I work and it's very interesting because now that I have a daughter and I see
how she thinks, she thinks exactly like I did as a child, always analyzing things trying
to put things together trying to make sense of how things work.
I remember in sixth grade for my science fair project I built a house and I built an alarm
system for it and figured out the circuits by myself and I had no formal training at
all in circuits.
I just really loved doing that and so science as a field has always been very interesting
to me.
Having the operating room as my laboratory really forces me to live to lives at once.
Alright so we are gonna get an x-ray now.
You know, my first responsibility is always to my patient and doing the right surgery
for my patient so a lot of what we do is standard clinical procedures.
We have experiments that are set up on the cart so that we can collect signals in real
time.
And the real challeng is that we don't want to be too much of a nuisance to the patient
so are doing us a huge favor and the community and the world a huge favor by giving us their
time in the operating room so we like to be as efficient as possible, get as much data
as possible.
FOREIGN LANGUAGE
Speaker 1: This lead was designed to stimulate the brain just like a pacemaker stimulates
the heart.
It has four contacts on it.
It's a total distance of about ten and a half milimeters or one centimeter of the brain
that we're collecting data from.
It's meant for stimulating and what we're doing that's different in the operating room
is we're not just stimulating we're actually recording through that electrode.
And I guess that recalls going back to what inspired me.
You know I realize as a young kid I remember a microphone you know you can actually hook
up a microphone to a speaker outlet and listen to music through the microphone.
I thought wow a microphone is the same thing as a speaker and so it's the same idea here
so the stimulator is the same thing that we can record through and that's exactly what
we're doing in the operating.
We're taking it into that unique oportunity of using the speaker as a microphone to record
from the brain.
There's a good example of cells firing.
So the reason why I work on Parkinson's Disease is most a practical issue and then something
that I've come to become passionate about because of the patients that I take care of.
So it's you know, you normally think that it is someone you knew or some kind of passion
for the field that drove me to it.
In fact it was the other way around for me.
In my clinical practice I was treating a lot of patients with Parkinson's Disease.
It became natural that that was my subject matter.
Those were the people I could really study.
But the more I've been in clinical practice, the more I've taken care of these patients
the more I've learnedd about the disease itself through my research because it's one of those
things were, you know, I remember when I first stated doing Parkinson's research, someone
said to me well you know it's just a tremor isn't it.
And you realize it's so much more and the disease and how it affects the brain is so
much more complicated than anyone really appreciates.
And so there's so much to be understood and there's so much potential.
The other reason I'm particularly intersted in Parkinson's Disease is it's a disease that
we have a really good treatment for but we don't understand the treatment.
And it's sort of I want to back pedal a little bit in that I wanna understand how the treatment
works and if we can understand how the treatment works maybe we can reverse engineer and figure
out how we can treat other diseases as well that we haven't been as successful at.
It's a passion for the disease as well as a passion for the patients that I take care
of at this point.
So I think being a scientist is actually one of the most exciting and fun parts of my professional
life because what we do as scientists, yes we sit at a computer and we analyze signals
but it's the times when we get to sit as a lab and review the data and brain storm and
say you know what do we actually think is going on.
You know, why is this happening.
What do we have to do to understand this a little bit better.
It's that intellectual stimulation and the back and forth it's really exciting for me
to work with students and see them sort of mature through the process of learning how
to think as a scientist.
That's really what's exciting in life.
You know a lot of what we do as doctors is very routine.
We do the same surgeries all the time but for me bringing the science into the operating
room is really what's exciting and what I think makes a bigger difference for the world
than each patient that I treat.
I love seeing my patients after surery because I love how much it helps them but I love the
thought even more that what I'm doing with them and how they're helping me in the operating
room might help even more people beyond that.
I think what we've seen recently, especially in students, is what we call the Milleneal
Effect, you know are very used to living in the era of the internet where there is an
answer.
You can always look up an answer.
And the hard part about that is ther aren't always answers and the only way to learn is
to really go out and try.
Another way for students to sort of explore science and research is to go to local conferences.
There's often student run conferences and that might be a good opportunity and much
less intimidating that going to a national conference.
But I think the other thing I would say is if you're interested in research, find something
that is interesting to you.
So a lot of people will end up going to a lab that's easy to get into but they don't
really like it.
I remember talking to one student who said you know I'm doing this drosophila research
which is research on flies.
I said well are you interested in it?
They said well no I don't really like it but the lab was you know it was easy to get into
the lab.
I said well then you're doing the wrong thing.
You know you shouldn't do something you're not interested in.
You should have a passion about it and that's gonna carry you much further than just getting
your foot in the door.
So an early foot in the door is not necessarily better than the right foot in the door."