Posted on October 29th, 2020 by Dr. Francis Collins
If you want to lose weight, then you actually want more fat, not less. But you need the right kind: brown fat. This special type of fatty tissue burns calories, puts out heat like a furnace, and helps to keep you trim. White fat, on the other hand, stores extra calories and makes you, well, fat. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could instruct our bodies to make more brown fat, and less white fat? Well, NIH-funded researchers have just taken another step in that direction [1].
Posted on November 7th, 2013 by Dr. Francis Collins
Photo Credit: Matthew Rowe, Michigan State University
If you’re a southern grasshopper mouse, nothing beats a delicious snack of scorpion. But what, you might ask, prevents that from being a painful or even fatal event? Well, this native of the Arizona desert has evolved an amazing resistance to the stings of the bark scorpion—stings so painful and toxic they kill house mice and other rodents of similar size.
Why am I sharing this bit of natural history? Well, it turns out that by studying the grasshopper mouse and its unusual diet, NIH-funded researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine and collaborators at the University of Texas, Austin, have identified a new target on nerve fibers that could lead to more effective and less addictive pain medications for humans.
Posted on November 5th, 2013 by Dr. Francis Collins
Many progressive neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s disease, are characterized by abnormal clumps of proteins that clog up the cell and disrupt normal cellular functions. But it’s difficult to study these complex disease processes directly in the brain—so NIH-funded researchers, led by a team at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, MA, have turned to yeast for help.
Now, it may sound odd to study a brain disease in yeast, a microorganism long used in baking and brewing. After all, the brain is made up of billions of cells of many different types, while yeast grows as a single cell. But because the processes of protein production are generally conserved from yeast to humans, we can use this infinitely simpler organism to figure out what the proteins clumps are doing and test various drug candidates to halt the damage.
Posted on October 31st, 2013 by Dr. Francis Collins
Caption: Dr. Jay Rubinstein and his mini-me, Landon Browne
Credit: Courtesy of Mary Guiden, Seattle Children’s Hospital
What costume to wear for Halloween? For many kids, it’s a difficult choice, but not so for 7-year-old Landon Browne. This year, he’s not going as a zombie or an action hero—he’s going as an NIH-funded researcher!
Landon, who was born almost completely deaf, has decided to dress up as his real-life superhero: Jay Rubinstein, M.D., Ph.D., a physician-scientist at Seattle Children’s Hospital who performed the surgeries that have enabled the boy to hear.
