"My name is Anna Radke, and I am a post-doctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Behavioral & Genomic
Neuroscience, which is in the National Institutes on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
Our lab is interested in how alcohol affects the brain, but it's certainly something that
touches a lot of us, and it is really one of the major health crises in the United States
and in the world.
I grew up in Cary, Illinois, which is outside of Chicago, and I had a really great upbringing,
typical suburban life.
I remember I did the science fair in seventh grade and I got to go downstate and present
a poster and do a project.
I think that was one of the earliest times that I really started to think, oh, science
is something I could keep doing and I'm good at and I really like to do.
My mom is interested in medicine and science, she is in the medical field.
She would always bring home scientific articles and I'd read about scientists doing their
work, and it instilled in my this sense of exploration.
That always seemed really interesting to me, that you could wake up every day and go to
work and ask questions about how the world works, and then try to figure out what the
answers to those questions are.
So, in the short term, we are looking for specific changes in brain function that could
be related to alcohol exposure.
What brain region are you looking at?
Speaker 2: I'm looking at the maxilla right now, and the prefrontal cortex.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Show me some of your ??. Let's see it in action.
Speaker 2: So, basically, you just have to make a lot of different chemical reactions
to get the tissue to stain the way you need it to.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
I saw that you were working on some of the ones that you did, I saw them on the microscope.
They look really good, so I think you have perfected this technique and it's looking
really good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm working on it.
You've designed this whole experiment.
You've put in a lot of work, and then you have the data and you get to analyze it and
you get kind of nervous.
Is it going to work out?
What actually happened here?
It's really exciting to see that resolve and see that you've discovered something new.
So, this is what we've been looking at with the NR1 virus, right?
And, we saw how often they were pressing during the available session vs. the unavailable
session.
But, we don't see any differences between the two genotypes yet.
Working with other scientists is really fun and really engaging.
We have a great group of people in our lab.
We all get along and love to work together and we're always coming up to each other saying
""Hey, had an idea for a project.
Could you help me with this?"".
It's a really engaging atmosphere to work in.
We do other procedures to manipulate brain function.
One of the paradigms we have is what's called 'punished reward seeking', and this is meant
to model the fact that alcoholics, and people who are addicted to other drugs and abuse,
will be compelled to take their drug, even though it might be ruining their life.
They are looking at that on a microscope, looking for different patterns of expression
and that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: stains the cell bodies that they're on, so it stains the DNA and the nucleus.
This gives us an idea of where we are in the brain.
Speaker 1: So, it's injected in the hippocampus.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Over a number of years, the goal would be for pre-clinical research like this to translate
into therapies for people who actually suffer from alcohol use disorders and substance abuse.
My advice to be to just try it out.
There are so many opportunities, even from a very young age, that you can get involved
in a lab.
People love to show you what they know, so don't be afraid to just contact people, try
to get exposure to it, and you might discover, hey, I really like this and it's something
I want to keep doing."