Working Scientist

In January 2022 the Biden administration announced its long-awaited strategy to safeguard scientific integrity across US federal research facilities and agencies.But 16 months on, do researchers working in those organisations feel better protected than they did under the administration led by Joe Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump?The Union of Concerned Scientists, a US non-profit and advocacy organisation based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has tracked more than 200 examples where scientific decision-making processes were politicised during the four-year Trump administration, compared to 98 under the 2001-9 presidency of George W Bush.In the second episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about freedom and safety in science, Jacob Carter, research director at the union’s centre for science and democracy, joins Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the US Climate Science Legal Defence Fund, to describe the impact of the Biden strategy in empowering scientist whistleblowers to speak out.“Don’t punish the people who do come forward,” says Kurtz. “Even if their claims are found to be not a true violation or there was a misunderstanding or something, it’s imperative to not punish people who came forth with good faith claims.”Finally, Evi Emmenegger, who studies aquatic animal pathogens at a US federal research facility, describes what happened after she raised concerns to her supervisors about contaminated waste water being released in nearby wetlands over a six-month period.Each episode in this series concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council about how it is exploring freedom, responsibility and safety in science. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

efJf Hawkins’ 2021 book A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, focuses on the neocortex and how it helps us to understand the world around us, before examining the future of artificial intelligence, based on what we already know about the brain.In this final episode of Tales from the Synapse, a 12-part podcast series about neuroscience, Hawkins describes how his book finishes on a philosophical note, by covering the future of humanity in an age of intelligent machines.Hawkins is chief scientist at Numenta, a research company he started 17 years ago in Redwood City, California. He career started in the semiconductor industry but his interest in the theories underpinning brain science was triggered by a 1979 article in Scientific American, written by Francis Crick.“I realized that I don’t think there’s anything more interesting or important to work on, because every human endeavour is based on the brain. Everything we have ever done in the arts and the sciences, and literature and humanities and politics. It’s all brains,” he says.Hawkins’ search for an academic career in theoretical brain science proved fruitless, prompting a return to industry and the founding of both Palm Computing and Handspring. In 2002 he established the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, now based at the University of California Berkeley.Tales from the Synapse is produced in partnership with Nature Neuroscience and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal. The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the first episode of a six-part podcast series about freedom and safety in science, Ukrainian neuroscientist Nana Voitenko relives how she and colleagues fled Kiev when war broke out in February 2022, and how the country’s research landscape and infrastructure has fared since.Also, physicist and climate scientist Liubov Poshyvailo-Strube describes her involvement in the Ukranian Global University (UGU), and how it is helping academics access educational and research opportunities outside Ukraine. Two challenges, she says, are supporting adult males who cannot leave the country during the conflict, and motivating early career researchers to return after hostilities case.Finally, Arctic researcher Matthew Druckenmiller, who is based at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, describes the war’s impact on Arctic science and collaborations with Russian colleagues, many of them dating back years.Each episode in this series concludes with a follow-up sponsored slot from the International Science Council about how it is exploring freedom, responsibility and safety in science. https://council.science/podcast/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Isabelle Mansuy’s neuroepigenetics lab researches the impact of life experiences and environmental factors on mental health, exploring if these impacts can be passed on to descendants.Epigenetic inheritance, she says, is not confined to diets and exposure of factors such as like endocrine disruptors or environmental pollutants. All of these can modify our body and have effects in our offspring. But Mansuy, who is based at the University of Zurich and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, also asks if trauma modifies not only our brains, but also our reproductive systems.There is still a lot of work needed, she adds, but the possibility that depression or borderline personality disorder might be something inherited from parents would be important for patients and clinicians to understand.Mansuy’s lab seeks to expose animals prenatally or after birth to conditions which mimic human stress. Her collaborators also provide access to blood and saliva samples from people exposed to childhood trauma, and medical students who are undergoing work placements in emergency rooms.This is the tenth episode in Tales from the Synapse, a 12-part podcast series produced in partnership with Nature Neuroscience and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal. The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an experimental treatment strategy which uses an implanted device to help patients with severe depression who have reached a point where no other treatment works.But despite her involvement in the DBS collaboration, which involves neuroscientists, neurosurgeons, electrophysiologists, engineers and computer scientists, neurologist Helen Mayberg does not see it as a long-term solution.“I hope I live long enough to see that people won't require a hole in their brain and a device implanted in this way,” she says . “I often have a nightmare with my tombstone that kind of reads like, what did she think she was doing?”Mayberg, director of the Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, introduces Brandy as a typical patient, who says of her condition; “It kind of holds me down, and it takes so much effort to do anything, or to experience anything, and there’s always that cost of, kind of reminds me of like scar tissue, like every time you stretch, it comes back and it holds you even tighter.”After receiving the treatment, Brandy describes the incremental changes that occurred: “Things got a little bit easier. And even in the smallest things, it got a little bit easier to brush your teeth, it got a little bit easier to get out of bed, it got a little bit easier to have hope. That just started a cascade of positive instead of the cascade of negative.”This is the tenth episode in Tales from the Synapse, a 12-part podcast series produced in partnership with Nature Neuroscience and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal.The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thomas Hummel, who researches smell and taste disorders at the Technical University of Dresden in Germany, describes international efforts to help patients who have lost their sense of smell, perhaps as a result of COVID-19, head trauma, chronic rhinosinusitis, and neurodegenerative diseases.Hummel points to the development of cochlear implants to help patients with hearing loss. “There could be similar implants inside the nasal cavity connected to the olfactory bulb, eliciting a pattern that might make sense to the brain,” he says.Describing his career path, Hummel, who is also a medical doctor, says unlike some other clinical research areas, his is more heavily dependent on international collaborations. “When you work in cardiovascular diseases you just look around the corner and there’s somebody who works on cardiovascular disorders. In the sense of smell it is different. You look around the corner, and there’s nobody.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 2020 the forced isolation of pandemic-related lockdowns led many of us to attend virtual fitness classes and undertake home baking projects. Chantel Prat wondered why she wasn’t interested in taking part. “I couldn’t help but notice and be frustrated by the fact that my brain was responding to the pandemic in a way that seemed very different from the people around me,” she says.At the time Prat was writing her book The Neuroscience of You. Published in 2022, it explores how different brains make sense of the world. “I've always been interested in the relationship between the mind and the brain, at the level of the individual, not how do brains work in general,” she says.“Right now I feel like we’re living through a great social paradox,” she adds. “People are discussing the importance of having diverse minds and brains and decision-making spaces. But yet, we don’t seem to be getting any better at talking through our differences.”To illustrate her point, Prat, who is based at the University of Washington in Seattle, uses the 2015 online image of a dress which went viral and generated heated debates about its colour. Was it white and gold, or blue and black? “This is just a tiny example of how our experiences shape this world-building that we're doing, the way our brains create inferences and connect the dots, even for something as elementary as colour.” she says.She also recalls how, as a single mother aged 19, she first recognised that her baby daughter Jasmine perceived the world in ways that surprised her, based on lab experiments that she participated in. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A child neurologist treating Christin Godale’s epilepsy was so impressed with his young patient’s interest in the brain he gave her some of his textbooks to read during an extended stay in hospital.“He said I should consider a career in neuroscience. That moment really changed my life,” says Godale, who followed his advice and went on to research epilepsy for her PhD at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio.Godale describes how at one point she was experiencing up to 30 seizures a day and spent periods in a coma, severely curtailing her quality of life, childhood friendships, and graduate school experiences.“I’ve developed some habits to combat these cognitive impairments that I experience,” she says. “I find myself writing down everything that I’m learning in a lecture and hearing at a meeting.”When the pandemic struck in March 2020 and labs shut down, Godale embarked on patient advoacy work and science communication via the Society for Neuroscience’s early career policy ambassadors program.She lobbied Congress members to increase federal funding for neuroscience research, and in late 2021 decided on a career path that would involve her in both academia and industry, working for a seed fund focused on life science and digital companies in southwest Ohio.“During my graduate studies, I networked a lot. I encourage any early career researcher listening to this podcast to prioritize networking while you’re in graduate school,” she says. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In his 2022 book Zero to Birth, How the Human Brain is Built, developmental neurobiologist William Harris includes ice hockey analogies to describe how the body’s most complicated organ develops in the womb, drawing on a 40-year career studying fruit fly, salamander, frog and fish embryos.Harris, professor emeritus at Cambridge University, UK, played the sport growing up in Canada and is now a coach. “A coach will have tryouts and select the best players for different positions,” he says. “The brain does the same thing. Maybe two neurons try out for every position, one makes it that’s a little bit better at communicating, and the other one doesn’t, going through a process called apoptosis. The survivors have to last your whole life.”Harris highlights some differences between human and animal brains, (cerebral cortex size, for example, and how newborn babies are hard wired to understand and develop speech). Writing the book, he believes, made him respect human and animal brains even more. “Probably our brains are the most unique things about us. We have unique faces, but our brains are even more unique. You just can’t see them,” he says. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An applied goal of Pieter Roelfsema’s lab at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam is to create a visual brain prosthesis aimed at people who have lost their sight.To help achieve this goal, the lab partners with both neurosurgeons and artificial intelligence researchers.“We are knowledgeable about how to put electrodes in the brain,” says Roelfsema, “but we collaborate with experts who know about how to make these electrodes so that they don't damage the brain tissue too much, also with people in artificial intelligence who can take camera images and translate them into brain stimulation patterns.“We also collaborate with neurosurgeons who can inform us how to really make this device and make it something that is going to be feasible for a neurosurgeon to really implant in the brain. That is definitely a very important goal for me, to bring this to a patient.”In episode five of Tales from the Synapse, a podcast series with a focus on brain science, Roelfsema describes how he handles requests from people who are pinning their hopes on being able to see again. “I have to explain this is not a clinically approved device,” he says.“Our ambition will be to go to humans in the next say, two years, or maybe a little bit later, but it’s still going to be research. There are all kinds of regulations, which are there for a good reason. And we have to show that we comply with all these regulations.”Tales from the Synapse is produced in partnership with Nature Neuroscience and introduced by Jean Mary Zarate, a senior editor at the journal. The series features brain scientists from all over the world who talk about their career journeys, collaborations and the societal impact of their research. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.