I ran a lot of MRIs for my PhD. I saw somewhere around 100-200 different brains. About 10% of them had abnormalities. Of all the technicians, scientists, and (non-clinical) doctors I spoke with, we all agreed this was a very high rate of discovery. All my friends graduated without seeing anything weird. My advisor liked to joke that I was cursed. Eventually I stopped inviting my friends to do my experiments because I didn't want to deal with the risk of them having an abnormality - thanks to some combination of HIPAA and medical liability laws, I wasn't allowed to say anything about it, even if asked point blank. I didn't like that very much.
I made one exception, as a friend of mine came in for a study and I saw a golf ball sized cyst in his sinus. He had it surgically removed and he told me he stopped snoring the next day. It felt good to make a difference for him.
But, I saw one brain similar to the one documented here. It belongs to one of my close friends. It was harrowing. Entire left hemisphere was malformed, the ventricles were way too big and the cortex was way too thin. But the right side of his brain was underdeveloped, maybe the size of a tennis ball.
The weirdest part, he is 100% normal. In fact, he competed at a high level of college athletics. Normal Cognition, normal motor function, great sense of humor, and a very caring person. Now he has a great job, wife and kid, and we hang out often. But I can't bring myself to say anything, and every time I see his son I wonder about his brain.
Pharmaceuticals in the US. Fairly early in my career, get paid just short of $100k/year. All it took was getting a doctorate and selling a little bit of my soul.
Sometimes I miss academic research. But at the end of the day I'm getting paid about 4x as much while working 1/2 the hours, by my estimate I'm 8x as happy now. Plus, there's something to be said for working on projects that actually affect people's lives instead of overstating the impacts of my research to compete for a dwindling pool of federal grants. Seeing the policy changes in the US this year, I'm very glad I left academia but I'm not convinced I'm 100% safe from changes made at the FDA.
No no, they listen. How do you think the "Hey Google" feature works? It has to listen for the key phrase. Might as well just listen to everything else.
I spent some time with a friend and his mother and spoke in Spanish for about two hours while YouTube was playing music. I had Spanish ads for 2 weeks after that.
I've raged and seethed about Neuralink so many times. There are so many obstacles needed to be overcome for a true Brain Computer Interface to work. Unless the company has magically solved some of the hardest problems in bioengineering, they're just sacrificing monkeys for sport.
The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) includes the laws governing the Food and Drug Administration. These laws are written in the blood of the exploited and vulnerable, like the victims of the Tuskeege Syphillis Experiment. Many of these regulations are specifically written to keep pharmaceutical and food companies from cutting corners in product development, testing, and manufacturing.
It's not a necessary disruption. It's going to kill a lot of vulnerable people.
The article describes the review process - you're right, these words just flag a paper for further review. I wonder if it's an automatic flagging system like you suggested.
However, it took me almost a decade of rigorous training to understand my research. I sure as hell don't trust an elected or appointed official with a political vendetta to critically read my grants. Leave politics out of peer review.
This is still an emergency situation, IMHO. Like you said, people's grants are being canceled. I see this as a direct attack against higher education.
ETA: It's also a waste of taxpayer money. These grants are already competing for meager funds. Why should we siphon away any resources to "investigate" them?
Here's a quick off-the-cuff list of neuroscience domains, not part of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, that will be impacted by this censorship. This is not an exhaustive list, it's just what I thought of after thinking critically for 10 minutes.
It goes without saying this practice is evil and reprehensible. No academic domain should be politically targeted. But it reaches more than their targets. It is dangerous. It is unscientific. It is book-burning. Contact your representatives. Take action. Donate to good causes.
Patient advocacy for people who have had a stroke, or have dementia, or have any number of disabilities, hereditary or acquired.
Any research about the blood brain barrier, including development of drugs that can cross it more efficiently.
Any research about the placental barrier, including development of safe medications for birthing people.
Research into cognitive bias.
Development of statistics (including Bayesian, the hot frontier), machine learning (that's AI for anyone who prefers that term), where the term bias is used to talk about parameters and model performance.
Basic visual and auditory science, where we talk about visual and auditory discrimination.
Sex differences research- this isn't just a social issue, we don't understand how differences in metabolism impact drug metabolism. Can't have female mice anymore, apparently.
Basic research in the function of neurons, which polarize, depolarize, hyperpolarize, etc.
Concussion research and, again, stroke research. The field is broadly known as traumatic brain injury.
Grapefruit interacts with specific metabolic pathways in the liver. Most medications are broken down by the liver. That's just how the body works, unfortunately
Shells or coral could serve as early tools, but (just my opinion) I feel it's a little human-centric to assume fire and metallurgy are required to progress. Just because we did it that way, doesn't mean another species would have to.
We've actually seen a handful of them in the community. MIT has an "Interesting Brain Project" https://news.mit.edu/2023/studies-of-unusual-brains-reveal-insights-brain-organization-function-0221.
If you're born that way, odds are you'll be more or less normal. It's amazing to see how resilient the human brain is.
In fact, one woman in China was born without a cerebellum. She wasn't exactly normal per se, but she was alive and more or less healthy. Even though the cerebellum is smaller by volume it has about the same number of neurons as the cerebrum. So she just had half a brain. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329861-900-woman-of-24-found-to-have-no-cerebellum-in-her-brain/