Rockefeller University neurobiologist Cori Bargmann, PhD, is quoted in today's New York Times as saying optogenetics is "the most revolutionary thing that has happened in neuroscience in the past couple of decades." The article is a profile piece of Karl Deisseroth, MD, PhD, the Stanford researcher who helped create the field of optogenetics, and it reveals how a clinical rotation in psychiatry led him to this line of work:
It was eye-opening, he said, “to sit and talk to a person whose reality is different from yours” — to be face to face with the effects of bipolar disorder, “exuberance, charisma, love of life, and yet, how destructive”; of depression, “crushing — it can’t be reasoned with”; of an eating disorder literally killing a young, intelligent person, “as if there’s a conceptual cancer in the brain.”
He saw patient after patient suffering terribly, with no cure in sight. “It was not as if we had the right tools or the right understanding.” But, he said, that such tools were desperately needed made it more interesting to him as a specialty. He stayed with psychiatry, but adjusted his research course, getting in on the ground floor in a new bioengineering department at Stanford. He is now a professor of both bioengineering and psychiatry.
Previously: A federal push to further brain research, An in-depth look at the career of Stanford’s Karl Deisseroth, “a major name in science”, Lightning strikes twice: Optogenetics pioneer Karl Deisseroth’s newest technique renders tissues transparent, yet structurally intact, The “rock star” work of Stanford’s Karl Deisseroth and Nature Methods names optogenetics its “Method of the Year
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