A team led by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers has discovered a new way that cells regulate senescence, an irreversible end to cell division. The findings, published in Cell, could one day lead to new interventions for a variety of conditions associated with aging, including neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and cancer, as well as new therapies for a collection of diseases known as ribosomopathies.
“There is great interest in reducing senescence to slow or reverse aging or aging-associated diseases. We discovered a noncoding RNA that when inhibited strongly impairs senescence, suggesting that it could be a therapeutic target for conditions associated with aging,” said Joshua Mendell, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Molecular Biology and a member of the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center at UT Southwestern. He is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
Dr. Mendell led the study with co-first authors Yujing Cheng, Ph.D., a recent graduate of the Genetics, Development, and Disease graduate program; and Siwen Wang, M.D., a former postdoctoral researcher, both in the Mendell Lab.
The human brain is the most complex information integrator known in the universe. With 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections between them, the brain gives us our rich subjective experiences and our capacity for free will — our consciousness.
Despite being a universal human phenomenon, consciousness is notoriously difficult to describe, and scientists still debate how it arises. In Then I Am Myself the World, neuroscientist Christof Koch offers the latest entry into the long list of books attempting to demystify the origins of our inner lives (SN: 1/5/22). While the topic can be a head-scratcher, Koch’s adept use of analogies and entertaining anecdotes — complete with his own near-death experience and psychedelic drug trips — make the book a compelling and surprisingly light read.
Professor Donald Hoffman is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of more than 90 scientific papers and three books, including Visual Intelligence and The Case Against Reality.
He is best known for his theory of consciousness, which combines evolutionary theory with mathematics to make a compelling case that the reality we see every day is an illusion created by our minds.
In this conversation, we explore:
— The groundbreaking scientific research being conducted by physicists into the “structures” beyond spacetime.
— Donald’s theory of conscious agents.
— The implications his theory of consciousness has for our understanding of the purpose of life.
As a medical scientist, he looks at how new findings will help develop new treatments to revive people now considered hopeless and restore brain damage.
Strengthening Public Health Systems For Healthier And Longer Lives — Dr. Ashwin Vasan, Commissioner, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Dr. Ashwin Vasan, MD, PhD is the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/about/ab…).
Dr. Vasan is a primary care physician, epidemiologist and public health expert with nearly 20 years of experience working to improve physical and mental health, social welfare and public policy for marginalized populations here in New York City, nationally and globally. Since 2014 he has served on the faculty at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, and he continues to see patients as a primary care internist in the Division of General Medicine at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
Dr. Vasan most recently served as the President and CEO of Fountain House, a national nonprofit fighting to improve health, increase opportunity, and end social and economic isolation for people most impacted by mental illness. During his tenure, he grew the organization from a New York-based community mental health organization to a national network across eight markets, and grew the budget by nearly $20 million annually. He helped navigate the organization through COVID-19 by driving new telehealth and digital mental health programs while its physical locations closed, as well as developing new community-based outreach and accompaniment programs. Further, Dr. Vasan led the creation of a national policy office in Washington, D.C., working to change national mental health policy on the issues of crisis response services and funding for and quality of community-based mental health services.
From 2016 to 2019, Dr. Vasan served as the founding Executive Director of the Health Access Equity Unit at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which focused on the intersection of clinical and social services for the care of people involved in the justice system and other vulnerable populations — a first-of-its-kind government program in the nation. Under his leadership the team launched the NYC Health Justice Network — an innovative partnership between community-based primary care providers, criminal legal system reentry organizations, the Health Department and the Fund for Public Health — to embed tech-enabled, peer community health workers to promote health and wellness of people reentering the community from incarceration, and their families. The program is currently under evaluation through the CDC Prevention Research Center grant to NYU and CUNY.
