Posts Tagged ‘neuro’

The Primate Paradox and Circuit Psychiatry: similarity between primate and human brains makes primate research potentially necessary for psychiatric cures, but does it also make it unethical?

06Nov16

Circuit Neuroscience Recently, research into psychiatric disease has made great strides, but continued progress may require unpopular and ethically murky research. Joshua Gordon, the new director of the National Institutes of Mental Health writes in this month’s Nature Neuroscience: “At this unique and exciting time for psychiatry, novel therapies for individuals with mental illnesses seem just around […]


Filed under: Animal Rights, Anxiety, Behavior, Circuit Neuroscience, Disease, Ethics, Human, Motor, Mouse, Optogenetics, Primate, Schizophrenia, Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment
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Card sorting, pot smoking, pleasure and one gene: COMT

29Jun12

COMT, Catechol-O-methyl transferase, is an enzyme that degrades catecholamines–such as dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine (or adrenaline and noradrenaline as they are called in the UK). It was first discovered in the ’50s by Nobel laureate and pirate Julius Axelrod. More recently, scientists discovered an evolutionarily recent nonsynonomous single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in the protein-coding portion of […]


Filed under: Behavior, Cannabis, Dorsolateral PFC, Drugs, Genetics, Human, Schizophrenia, SNPs   |  9 Comments
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