Consider the human brain. With 100 billion nerve cells, each one with about 10,000 different connections, it may easily be the most complex creation on earth. It orchestrates sensation and cognition, memory and motion, vital functions and consciousness of self and the world.
Viewed through this prism, it’s easy to be awed by the immensity of the challenge ahead for neuroscientists, such as Dr. Joshua A. Gordon, who are bent on understanding the brain’s inner circuitry and how to fix it when something goes wrong.
Dr. Joshua A. Gordon (National Institutes of Health)
Gordon has an unrivaled opportunity to set the agenda for much of this research. Named the new director of the National Institute of Mental Health last month, he will preside over the nation’s leading mental health institution. NIMH has a budget of $1.5 billion that is used to support more than 2,000 research grants to scientists in the United States and abroad. He also will oversee the work of 300 staff scientists on the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Maryland, and elsewhere.
“Josh is a visionary psychiatrist and neuroscientist with deep experience in mental health research and practice,” said National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins in his announcement of the appointment. “We’re thrilled to have him join the NIH leadership team.”
U.S. News recently spoke with Gordon, currently an associate professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, as he prepares to assume leadership in September. Excerpts:
Can you talk a little about your priorities? When I scanned the strategic plan [published in May 2015 under former director Dr. Thomas R. Insel], I was struck by how far ranging it is.
It’s extremely broad, because the mission of NIMH is tremendously broad. I want to start with [the strategic plan], because it is a document that was created thoughtfully by my predecessor and by his advisers, both inside and outside NIMH. As someone coming into [NIMH], I will work with my advisers to make sense of where we want to go and then, possibly, tweak it a little bit. Even if you want to steer a ship, you can’t have it turn on a dime. That process will absorb most of my first few months, if not my first year.
Although you are a psychiatrist, you have been running a lab and doing quite a bit of basic research. Can you talk a little about your background?
I try to understand basic neuroscience mechanisms. It’s not pure neuroscience research, guided simply by a desire to understand how the brain works, but rather by a desire to understand how the brain works – and doesn’t work – when psychiatric disease occurs. My own work seeks to understand the basic neuroscience mechanisms underlying schizophrenia, anxiety and depression.
What about clinical research, all the work that goes into finding new treatments for mental illness?
As a psychiatrist, I have a lot of exposure to other areas of research. I am going to have to learn the ropes, in terms of what’s important, new and efficacious in research areas I haven’t been engaged in directly. I’m looking forward to learning as much as I can about the state of clinical research, so I can manage it and hopefully contribute.
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Addiction is one of the biggest mental health issues of our time. Do you have a strategy for tackling it?
Addiction is the primary mission of the National Institute of Drug Abuse. I’ve already had discussions with NIDA director [Dr. Nora D. Volkow] about areas where there are opportunities for collaboration. Some of them are basic science [areas] where drug abuse, schizophrenia and diseases like obsessive compulsive disorder overlap. All [of these] involve disruption of a brain region called the striatum. Studies that aim to understand the function and dysfunction in the striatum are relevant to psychiatric and addictive disorders.
This is an era of big science, perhaps on a grander scale than ever before, aided by parallel revolutions in genetic research, imaging and information science. The Brain Initiative is among the biggest. What does it involve?
The Brain Initiative is really about trying to figure out how the brain produces behavior, which results from patterns of neural [nerve] activity. The methods we have now are limited in their ability to [study] this activity. We think there are likely to be important properties of neural activity that we can only measure if we assess it across literally thousands of neurons and [dozens], if not more, brain regions, because all these neurons – and all these brain regions – work together. Currently we can record from hundreds of neurons at a time. We want to be able record from thousands, or maybe tens of thousands, of neurons. We want to be able to do this in animals and then dream up technology that we can’t even imagine now, to do it in humans.
What about variation from one person’s brain to another? What makes us alike and what makes us different?
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That’s a great question. It’s under active investigation, in [an initiative called] the Human Connectome Project. The goal is to catalogue the structures of the brain and map how they’re connected in an almost encyclopedic way, akin to the map of the human genome. We do this by scanning hundreds and hundreds of people and looking at the variability of [major brain pathways] and neural connections from person to person. You can have a person do a certain task, say it’s a memory task, and map the parts of the brain engaged in that task. Then you’d do that again in a couple of hundred, or maybe a thousand, people. From that you’d get a sense of how activity patterns differ from human to human. Then you could do it again with another task.
What excites you in neuroscience today?
One of the most exciting things is our ability to manipulate certain networks in the brain. We have the tools now to identify and manipulate small groups of nerve cells and networks that are active during particular behaviors. That gives us a tremendous ability to understand the underpinnings of behavior at the level of groups of [nerve] circuits. From a therapeutic perspective, this could allow us to develop novel treatments for psychiatric disorders based on a circuit-level understanding of how the brain works. It’s not a short-term thing, but it holds exciting possibilities for the future.