Word: neuroscientists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Spider venom is a gold mine of pharmacological tools," explains Michael Adams, a venom-using neuroscientist at the University of California at Riverside. The active compounds in venom bind with extreme selectivity to molecules on the surfaces of living cells, a property that can be of invaluable use to researchers developing new medicines with better specificity (and thus fewer side effects) or just trying to understand, at the molecular level, the inner workings of living cells...
...venom purchased from Kristensen in the 1980s, for example, helped neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas of New York University School of Medicine discover a new calcium channel involved in the communication between certain neurons, shedding new light on how the mind works. Another toxin extracted from Spider Pharm venom in 1995 by Kenton Swartz at the National Institutes of Health (named hanatoxin after Swartz's daughter) is being used to probe the function of proteins that are located on cellular membranes and have been implicated in diseases ranging from diabetes to epilepsy...
Beyond that, things get murky. It's not yet clear, for example, when tau enters the picture. Up to now, most thought the tangles form much later than the plaques. But neuroscientist Peter Davies of Albert Einstein College of Medicine thinks this view will be proved wrong. He believes some still unidentified biochemical event precedes the formation of tangles and plaques, perhaps a malfunction in the machinery that puts proteins together. "The question from the therapeutic standpoint," he observes, "is, What's responsible for the symptoms of disease? What's killing the cells? Is it amyloid...
...spite of music's remarkable influence on the human psyche, scientists have spent little time attempting to understand why it possesses such potency. "We tend to think of music as an art or a cultural attribute," notes Robert Zatorre, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, "but it is a complex human behavior that is as worthy of scientific study as any other...
...tantalizing as these bits of research are, they barely begin to address the mysteries of music and the brain, including the deepest question of all: Why do we appreciate music? Did our musical ancestors have an evolutionary edge over their tin-eared fellows? Or is music, as M.I.T. neuroscientist Steven Pinker asserts, just "auditory cheesecake," with no biological value? Given music's central role in most of our lives, it's time that scientists found the answers...