I wanted to highlight a question asked by Barb on my question thread, and share a little about what it’s like to be a biomedical scientist working on basic research problems with possible applications to disease therapies. Here’s the question Barb asked:
“Mollie, I’d like to pick your brain for resources. I have a son, 30, MIT alum, PhD physics. He has incurred brain damage… If it were your brother, what would you do for him?”
Because my lab’s explicit long-term research goal is to be able to fix diseased and damaged brain circuitry, we get questions like this with some frequency. A few of our postdoctoral fellows did their graduate work in our field, and they talk about the times they answered the lab phone to find a patient or a distraught parent on the other end, begging them to help. We hurt every time we get questions like this, because we don’t have the luxury of being snake oil salesmen with a cure for anything and everything. All we want is a cure for this one tiny corner of human suffering, but we don’t even have that in hand.
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