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| A NEW ERA IN NEUROSCIENCE |
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The coming years will see rapid discoveries about our mind and behavior, bringing the potential for therapies and cures of neurological diseases.Trying to understand the human brain is more than a fascinating exercise in modern biology and psychology. It has profound implications for the future of human health and for society. Understanding the biological underpinnings of our mind—how it functions normally, what makes it go astray, and how to make it right again—is one of the great challenges facing the 21st century. The cost of neurological diseases is enormous. Neurological disorders affect one in five Americans annually, with an estimated $400 billion in direct costs and lost productivity. For example, just one disorder—Alzheimer's disease, a neurodegenerative disease associated with aging—alone costs our society about $100 billion a year for treatment and care. The human toll is incalculable.
The problem of trying to understand the human brain is daunting: Trillions of neurons each make thousands of specific connections (called synapses) with one another, and the dynamic information that flows across these connections controls the very essence of how we behave, perceive, and remember. Our brain is by far the most complex tissue in our body, with a greater diversity of cell types than in all other organs and tissues combined. It is not surprising that the largest share of our genes is required for this most complex organ that controls behavior, identity, and consciousness.
Not long ago, talking openly about disorders of the mind was largely taboo. For decades, our society rapidly embraced biomedical knowledge concerning diseases and malfunctions of most of our organs and tissues. From cancer to heart disease, we began to comprehend the notion that the genes inherited from our parents combined with our lifestyle to play a crucial role in our proclivity for many of these diseases and our prognosis for recovery. Until recently, older people who lost their memory were pushed aside, and in some cases ridiculed, as going senile. We now know that these conditions of aging have a biological basis. Alzheimer's disease affects five to 10 percent of people in their 60s, 25 percent of people by age 85, and a growing percentage in later life. In Alzheimer's disease, specific nerve cells become sick and die because of a complex degenerative process that impairs the functioning of the brain. The result is progressively impaired memory, depression, confusion, and—after many years of suffering—death.
Understanding our brain holds the key for therapies
and cures for many common human brain disorders.
Thanks to the techniques of cell biology, molecular biology, and genetics, a great deal is being learned about the exact molecular details of the nerve cell degeneration that leads to this tragic chain of events. Precise information about several proteins has greatly improved our ability to diagnose this disease and has become basis for the development of treatments to prevent or arrest degeneration. In this way, the knowledge and technology of scientists who were interested in fundamental problems of biology and neuroscience is being applied to an immensely important human disease. Research on this one neurological disease has progressed so fast in recent years that we now believe the disease will soon be greatly alleviated, perhaps even cured.
Almost daily, one reads about marvelous discoveries stemming from basic science research on the brain. Among them have been the identification of the genetic lesion leading to Huntington's disease, new insights into the possible causes of Alzheimer's disease, and the search for the genetic basis of schizophrenia and other forms of mental illness. Understanding our brain holds the key for therapies and cures for many common human brain disorders, including diseases of memory, neurodegeneration, spinal cord injury, stroke, psychiatric disease, and drug addiction.
How Brain Science Has Evolved
Neuroscience is the scientific study of how the brain functions to control behavior (i.e., how we see, perceive, and feel; the biological basis of cognition, language, identity), how the brain gets wired up (i.e., how in the embryo and during early childhood we generate a set of neural circuits more powerful than the most sophisticated supercomputer), how it changes with learning and memory (i.e., how experiences are encoded, accessed, and retrieved in its circuits and connections), and how it fails with aging and disease.
Neuroscience originated in the early 19th century with studies of the anatomy of the brain (by examination of its component parts with the naked eye), and progressed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to an examination of its cellular components with increasingly powerful microscopes. With the growth of biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology in the second half of the 20th century, neuroscientists began to study the molecules—especially proteins, nucleic acids, and neurotransmitters—that are the basis of the brain's special characteristics. Now new ways are being developed to apply this wealth of knowledge to an understanding of the whole brain, and how it gives rise to human thought and emotion.
Today, neuroscience transcends the boundaries that define traditional academic departments and traditional modes of education and support. Once housed within anatomy or physiology departments, neuroscience has emerged as its own multidisciplinary field. Understanding the brain depends upon technical and intellectual advances from almost every area of modern science, from physics to biology to psychology.
As a scientific discipline, neuroscience has grown enormously over the past two decades. For example, the Society for Neuroscience was founded in 1969 with 500 members. Today it has more than 28,000 members. A few decades ago, one could only dream of how one might someday study and unravel the mysteries of the brain. But during the 1980s and 1990s, the tools began to emerge that allow us to begin to unravel this mystery.
Studies on the brain are rapidly expanding in two complementary directions. On the one hand, neuroscience is advancing dramatically from techniques and approaches of molecular and cell biology—recombinant DNA, gene cloning, transgenic and gene knock-out technologies, and functional genomics. With such tools, the functions of genes can be manipulated with remarkable elegance in a variety of nervous systems to elucidate the molecular basis of the brain's behavior, plasticity, function, and development.
But the brain is more than its genes and synapses. It is also an amazing computational machine, and dramatic technical advances—e.g., PET, fMRI, SQUID, and other physiological, imaging, and computational techniques—have begun to make it possible to study entire networks of neurons as they function in the living brain, or as they might theoretically work (as modeled on powerful computers). These advances have transformed the fields of psychology, linguistics, and other social sciences so that the brain and behavior can, for the first time, be dissected functionally.
An era of rapid discovery about our mind and behavior lies ahead of us, bringing the potential
for therapies and cures of neurological diseases.
Neuroscience transcends the boundaries that define traditional academic
departments and traditional modes of education and support.
Neuroscience, still a fledgling scientific endeavor 20 years ago, is now more mature. We are beginning to understand the basic mechanisms of nerve cell development, function, and plasticity, as well as how molecules and genes control these events. In addition, the field has exploded in terms of studies on perception, cognition, and behavior, largely fueled by new, noninvasive methods of watching regional brain activity of people engaged in thoughts and tasks; and by new techniques for monitoring the function of many neurons simultaneously in awake, behaving animals.
The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience is committed to advancing the field by supporting creativity and innovation to bridge the gap between basic neuroscience and neurological disease. We will nurture young scientists, seek creative ideas, foster technological innovations, and fuel paradigm shifts. In these ways, we pledge our commitment to neuroscience and humanity as we work to unravel the mysteries of the mind and behavior and ultimately to cure diseases and malfunctions in our brain.
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