Latest news with #brainresearch
Globe and Mail
3 days ago
- General
- Globe and Mail
Beyond ‘burnt toast': Eric Andrew-Gee probes the story of Penfield and Cone in The Mind Mappers
'I can smell burnt toast.' Most Canadians over 30 remember the 1991 Heritage Minute short that celebrated the revolutionary Dr. Wilder Penfield, who experimented on the brain's temporal lobes in the 1930s. Less well remembered is his partnership with the Iowa-born neurosurgeon William Cone. It was this collaboration that enabled Penfield to turn the Montreal Neurological Institute, familiarly known as the Neuro, into a global epicentre for brain research between the late 1920s and late 1950s. In his new book, The Mind Mappers, The Globe and Mail's Eric Andrew-Gee brings the unusually symbiotic relationship between this odd couple compellingly to life, giving due respect to Cone, whose life ended tragically inside the institution to which he had devoted the best part of his career. The partnership of these two neurosurgeons in Montreal seems like one of those perfect alignments of serendipity. How does it come about? Cone and Penfield had these eerily parallel childhoods. They were both raised in the American Midwest in the turn of the 20th century. Penfield's father had abandoned the family after going bankrupt as a feckless doctor in Spokane, Washington. He packed his family up on a train, sent them to live with his wife's family and then never joined them. Cone's father contracted typhoid fever and died when Cone was 2. They both grow up with stories of medical greatness in their families, but also medical failure. When they finally cross paths at Presbyterian Hospital in New York in the 1920s, their heads are in a very similar place. Penfield is one of a couple dozen practising neurosurgeons in the world, and he's basically learning on the fly because there's no one to teach him. That's the state of neurosurgery at the time. It was so rudimentary, so crude, so dangerous for patients, and so heartbreaking for practitioners who were constantly losing patients. Cone arrives as a research fellow. He's interested in the brain from his medical training in Iowa. His grandmother had died of a brain tumour, so he had the brain on the brain. Penfield wonderfully describes this moment when he sees Cone walking down this stairwell in the hospital. In retrospect, he realizes this is the moment that set the course of his life. They immediately realize there's chemistry there, although they're polar opposites. The differences are striking. There seems to have been a kind of symbiosis through opposition. Penfield's this tall, dapper, handsome, athletic guy. Very outgoing, charismatic and well-spoken. Cone is none of those things. He's stocky and socially awkward. He might be diagnosed with Asperger's nowadays. He prefers tinkering in his workshop, inventing new surgical tools, and sitting with patients, holding their hands. Penfield is an excellent doctor and cares about patients, but he also has grand philosophical visions of what the study of the brain could be. It's a perfect match because one is very hands-on and practical and one is a silver-tongued orator and scientific visionary. When Penfield is recruited by the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, his one condition is they hire Cone too. You started off researching Penfield, and then stumbled upon this little-known character, Cone, who effectively ends up the hero of your book. Tell me about that discovery. There's an internal history of the Neuro – a coffee-table sort of book – with a chapter on Cone that describes this figure who's probably the greatest neurosurgeon of his generation. The master of masters. Incredible judgment, incredible dedication and the most patient-oriented doctor anyone had ever met. Thanks to his extraordinary gifts as a doctor, he made possible the scientific leaps that had originally gotten me interested in Penfield's work. Then, in his early 60s, he dies suddenly in his office in tragic circumstances that bring the golden age of the institute to an end. I got the sense that this was a great archetypal story, this master-and-apprentice relationship. As a storyteller I was hooked, but as a person I was just so moved by Cone's saintliness, by the fact that this medical hero who was at the heart of one of the great stories in Canadian science was totally forgotten. He really comes to life in the book, which is remarkable given the lack of paper trail. Penfield had a sense of his legacy, so he kept every piece of paper that crossed his desk, and a journal. Cone has virtually none of that. He hated to write because it slowed him down. He wouldn't even write patents for the surgical tools he invented. It could have made him tons of money. People would badger him to write back about a simple, 'Are you coming to this medical conference?' Author John Green became obsessed with tuberculosis – so he wrote a book about it So virtually everything we know about Cone comes from Penfield's archive, from their correspondence, because he did write to Penfield. Their correspondence is extraordinary. Tender longing when they're apart. It was in the clipped style of mid-century Protestant North American men, but it's nonetheless revealing. To that point, there's a strong suggestion that Cone's devotion to Penfield – he turns down the opportunity to run his own institute to stay on as Penfield's second-in-command, for substantially less pay – might have been more than platonic. Male friendships can be as fraught and turbulent as any love affair. I do think Cone's feelings ultimately tipped over into the romantic. I don't know if he ever acknowledged that to himself. Almost certainly not to Penfield. It was illegal to be homosexual in Canada at that time. There's all this circumstantial evidence that his love for Penfield was something more than platonic. He had this bitterly unhappy marriage, had no children. On its own, that doesn't tell you much, but then there's the tone of the letters to Penfield. When Penfield doesn't appoint Cone his successor when he decides to retire, it devastates him. Probably it wasn't the right role for Cone in some way, but the way Penfield went about it felt to Cone like a stab in the back. He has a meltdown. He falls into a deep depression in the years after this rift. And I'm not sure the scale of his reaction makes sense if his feelings for Penfield were merely platonic. What are Cone and Penfield's greatest achievements – either singly or together? Cone made the hospital hygienic, functional, medically sound, so that people wanted to come there and be cured. But it was Penfield's ideas that made their legacy. Penfield had a sister who had a brain tumour in her frontal lobe that caused seizures. In 1928 he and Cone operated on her at the Royal Victoria Hospital and she almost died. Penfield was a little too aggressive and carved out about an eighth of her brain without really knowing what the frontal lobes did. Book Review: Original Sin details Biden's declining health and a cover-up by closest advisers She survived the operation, but the tumour grew back and she died. In the meantime, her personality changed. She became, as he described it, like a lump of putty. Penfield realized he'd been reckless, and that he needed to map the brain if he was going to be an effective surgeon. That's what he and Cone did, and that's their greatest achievement. They were like the early cartographers. They developed this procedure for treating epilepsy that would simultaneously map the brain. In the course of doing this, they were also figuring out what different regions of the brain were responsible for. And this is absolutely crucial, not only for surgeons to know where not to cut, but for the treatment of neurological conditions. It was the mind-body problem that had always puzzled philosophers and scientists: Is there a ghost in the machine, different from our gray matter, that makes us? This interview has been condensed and edited
Forbes
24-05-2025
- Health
- Forbes
Brilliantly Mapping AI In Healthcare
BLACKBURN, ENGLAND - MAY 14: A Doctor There's a lot going on inside the human brain, and for a while now, scientists have been trying to use AI to crack open this jewel of our central nervous system, and better understand how it works. It's been slow progress, partly because of the complexity and the very unique ways that the human brain processes information and responds to stimuli. Nevertheless, we are making progress, and a recent panel on healthcare talked about the ways that clinical research is advancing based on AI systems modeling the brain. Panelist Rekha Ranganathan talked about the robust ways that AI is contributing, and the 800+ applications that have been developed for radiology. 'For me, what is really interesting is: AI is really aiding diagnosis, and reporting, and helping our healthcare physicians get faster, better and more effective in patient outcomes, but not quite close yet in terms of what humans can do.' Ed Boyden is an MIT professor. He talked about Alzheimer and Parkinson's research, and using AI. 'Increasingly, we're trying to use our mapping and control tools to make maps of the brain so detailed that you could simulate the brain in the computer, and with molecular mechanistic information, we really would want to know, how does a molecule play a role in a emergent function or a disease state?' he said. 'And so the hope is that we could really pinpoint where in the brain to intervene (for battling) brain disease.' Anurang Revri works at Stanford, where they have been modeling proteins and doing other important clinical research. 'We support research education as well as clinical care,' he said. 'So it's an interesting sort of place to be, where we have this kind of amazing research that we can translate into clinical workflows or external vendors and solutions. So that's sort of our focus, to implement the responsible AI life cycle.' Jamie Metzl wrote the book 'Superconvergence' that deals with the ramifications of new advances in our lives. 'What I'm focusing on is the transition of our healthcare system,' he said. 'You're all familiar with the first jump from generalized medicine based on population averages, to personalized or precision health. And the next step is from precision to predictive and preventive, and all these other things, which is going to be the intersection of all the tools that we've been talking about, and the applications within healthcare.' He also talked about structured classifications and challenges in mapping. As moderator Juan Enriquez said, these are some of the most cited papers in science, working on diagnosis, as well as abstract things like people's thoughts and fears. 'What we are doing today is very much saying, based on what we know, on the basic physics of imaging, (how) a disease can be mapped, and then I think maybe a little bit of predictive focus on what is potentially likely to happen based on the imaging that the patient underwent in their 20s or 30s or 40s, if we have that longitudinal, you know, time mapping,' Ranganathan said. Boyden talked about how microscopy works. 'With expansion microscopy, we can take a cell or a piece of tissue, and infuse it with basically the stuff you find in (physical systems) and add water, and we can make it bigger, subtracting all those building blocks of light,' he said. 'And so the hope is that we can map those parts and how they touch. That is, in some ways, sort of the answer: the list of all the (mediating) interactions.' Revri talked about 'connecting all the dots' with healthcare solutions, and the importance of multimodal systems. 'When you start combining all those pieces of data and building models, multimodal models, around that, then it becomes a really powerful thing in clinical care,' he said. 'Somebody shows up with an image, and then somebody looks at the genetics, and somebody looks at the protein structures, and somebody looks at what's going on the firing of the brain. And that's really important in a time when 95% plus of central nervous system drugs fail, because we don't have the basic maps…. right? So we're trying to solve things without having maps.' – Juan Enriquez, moderator 'We don't have separate systems for our genetics and our epigenetics, and all these are shorthand classifications we use for ourselves. Our biology is integrated. It's a dynamic system of systems.' – Jamie Metzl 'If you're a patient, and you walk into a clinic, you're most likely getting an AI generated report, right? Mammography is one of those areas.' – Rekha Ranganathan 'The future is here, but right now, it really takes a lot of effort to get (access to the new tech), and the goal of everything is just to make this seamless, as you're already describing with the radiology, but really across the board. There are so many pain points. There are so many points where there are these really life-saving capabilities that not everybody has access to, and that's the connection between what we're talking about in healthcare, and everything that we're discussing here in AI, because there's so much cross learning between the different sectors.' Part of what this panel showed me was that urgency that Enriquez talked about, in reforming our healthcare sector, but also the quick progress that we're making in deciphering our own signals at a neurological level. Will we win the race? And how will AI change healthcare in 2, in 5, in 10 years? We'll see.
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Trump injected uncertainty into federal contracting. Donor brains went to the grave.
President Donald Trump's push to cut billions of dollars in government contracts is rattling the niche community of scientists who collect, study and share human brains. Two of the country's brain banks, which have worked with the government to store and distribute specimens to researchers studying diseases like Parkinson's and ALS for more than a decade, told POLITICO they had temporarily stopped taking new donations for fear the administration would not renew their contracts. Even though both facilities — home to nearly 8,000 brains between them — eventually received six-month extensions from the National Institutes of Health, the relief came too close to a May 1 deadline. The director of the University of Maryland Brain and Tissue Bank said it turned away as many as 30 brains from people hoping to do something positive with the remains of a loved one who lived with a neurological disease. The Mount Sinai Brain Bank in New York would have accepted roughly 10 more if it had known its contract was being renewed, according to its program director. The funding whiplash demonstrates some of the practical consequences of the Trump administration's rapid-fire approach to cutting federal spending, where even the potential for funding lapses create real setbacks. "Not knowing when, or even if this extension was going to happen, it was very problematic," said Tom Blanchard, director of Maryland's brain bank. The window for collecting a brain for research after death is short: just 24 hours, so families of would-be donors had little choice but to give up. Unsure whether it'd be able to pay staff after April, Mount Sinai Brain Bank sent layoff notices to its nearly two dozen employees, then revoked them when it learned of the funding extension less than 18 hours before the deadline, said program director Harry Haroutunian. In the month before the contract expiration, the program, which stores 2,640 brains in 43 freezers set at minus 80 degrees Celsius, stopped taking them. Mount Sinai typically takes two brain donations a week. "I wasn't about to accept a donation and then not be in a position to actually characterize the brain and distribute it to our investigators," Haroutunian said. When asked to respond to researcher concerns about funding uncertainty, a spokesperson at the Department of Health and Human Services said that leaders at HHS, the parent agency of the National Institutes of Health, maintain continuous communication with NIH leadership to ensure smooth funding. The spokesperson said NIH remains committed to "rigorous, Gold Standard Science." Susan Mojaverian felt heartened by the idea of donating her brother James' brain to the NIH. She'd discussed the plan with him prior to his death last month. James, who died at 72, was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was 16. Furthering research into schizophrenia was important to them. Susan and James participated in an NIH schizophrenia sibling study where they traveled to the agency's Bethesda, Maryland, campus for days of psychological tests and MRIs. Research on donor brains has helped scientists understand the genetic risk for schizophrenia, shown distinct scarring patterns on the brains of servicemembers who suffered blast injuries and helped identify cells that contribute to developing Down syndrome. Through the NIH's NeuroBioBank, researchers around the world can search an inventory of thousands of brains across the six repositories, refine their search by diagnosis, age, race, gender and brain region, then order brain tissue by volume, weight or number of brain sections. The NIH manages researcher requests, while the repositories collect and prepare the donor brains, fulfill orders and mail out tissue. All scientists pay is shipping. Without the NIH program, brain donor research would be prohibitively expensive, said Blanchard. A single piece of brain tissue could cost $250 through a commercial lab, he explained, and researchers need to purchase enough samples to produce statistically significant results — plus buy control group samples. Without the federally funded network saving them millions of dollars a year, researching human tissue might be too expensive for some scientists. The loss of the brains at Maryland and Mount Sinai could have consequences for research, he added, pointing to the brains of Parkinson's patients: "Everybody wants to study the same small region of the brain, the substantia nigra," Blanchard said, adding, "Even though we have the whole brain, for the Parkinson's research community, they get exhausted quickly." When Mojaverian contacted the director of the NIH's Human Brain Collection Core by email, he offered his condolences and the Maryland brain bank's phone number. He added a note in his reply, stressing the importance of James' donation. "For UMD: the decedent was extensively studied at NIH as a participant with schizophrenia. It would be important to acquire this brain if at all possible." Later that day, Mojaverian approached Maryland about making the donation, and was told it wouldn't be possible. Maryland's donor portal was clear about the reason why: "Due to the uncertainty of federal funds UMBTB is anticipating a funding gap, that will impact our ability to collect donations. We cannot anticipate how long this funding gap will be." By the time Maryland learned of its contract extension 16 days later, the window to accept James' brain had passed. Mojaverian, who said she's had a good experience with NIH researchers and doctors over the decades, blamed the Trump administration for her loss. 'This is the contribution that my brother, who had so much potential in this world and was never able to achieve it because of this severe and persistent mental illness — that he could be making this major contribution to science and somebody else would benefit from it,' she said. Members of Congress, including Republicans, have also complained about the administration's approach to cost-cutting. 'Stability is a key aspect of the American formula because it allows scientists to focus their work knowing that they will have the support they need to pursue and test their ideas from start to finish,' Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) said during an Appropriations Committee hearing last month. Vice Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) put it more directly. 'Trump is committing deliberate sabotage at NIH and creating indefensible uncertainty that is making it impossible for researchers to do their jobs,' Murray told POLITICO. The ambiguity and eleventh-hour funding decisions at the brain banks are indicative of a larger phenomenon the NIH-funded research ecosystem is grappling with as Trump reconsiders its work. Another program that suffered funding whiplash was the Women's Health Initiative, an ongoing long-term national women's health study backed by an NIH institute. On April 21, initiative investigators reported that HHS was terminating the program's regional center contracts. A few days later, following widespread news coverage, an HHS spokesperson told POLITICO the funding was being restored. It wasn't until May 5 that contractors received official confirmation. Without timely communication, investigators were left to wonder whether HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s public comments calling the centers' work "mission critical for women's health" and the cuts "fake news" meant that HHS would maintain current funding levels, impose some funding reductions or whether nothing had changed and the cuts were still coming. HHS said that government procedures and bureaucratic processes held up officially notifying the group of restored funding. While renewing and restoring research funding have run up against the red tape of government processes and procedures, cuts have come more swiftly, with few signs that bureaucracy is holding them up. Regardless of the cause of the notification delay, the uncertainty had a chilling effect. Investigators, especially early career researchers, were reluctant to pitch new projects to the Women's Health Initiative. Staff worried about losing their jobs. Managers wondered how they'd quickly wind down the 32-year-old project, notify the 42,000 participants and destroy or negotiate transfer of 4 million vials of frozen biospecimens. Meanwhile, the administration's decision to extend the brain bank contracts for six months doesn't end the banks' uncertainty. While Blanchard said he's optimistic in the wake of the renewal, if a month or two passes without word of the next review or funding meeting, his anxiety will return. While the October contract renewal should be for five years, he's concerned that his funding level could be cut, likely causing him to reduce donations once again or cut staff. NIH program officers told Mount Sinai's Haroutunian that maintaining the program's resources is an agency priority and that they expect to be able to renew the funding in October, he said. "But that's guesswork on everybody's part," he added.
