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Joshua Gordon: an interdisciplinary approach to mental health
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Profile Joshua Gordon: an interdisciplinary approach to mental health
www.thelancet.com/psychiatry Vol 4 April 2017
levels is very challenging. One needs to make links across those levels. How the causes of psychiatric illness, be they environmental or genetic, act on cellular processes. We need to understand how those dysfunctional cellular processes lead to dysfunctional behaviours.” “Mathematical formulas can help us bridge those gaps”, Gordon argued. “You can build a model of cellular function, integrate that into a model of circuit function, and ask whether a particular dysfunction that’s seen in a psychiatric risk factor will lead to patterns of circuit dysfunction you might be able to observe in animal models or humans.” In 2004, Gordon joined Columbia University as an associate professor of psychiatry, and as a research psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, as well as in general psychiatric practice. In accepting the position as director of the NIMH, Gordon was forced to confront the difficult decision to step away from those commitments, particularly regarding the patients he’s treated for years and the research lab that occupied three-quarters of his time. “I wrestled with that a lot”, Gordon said. “One of things that convinced me, though, that it was an endeavour worth doing was talking to the other institute directors. All of whom, basically, came from labs of one kind or another, and several of whom continued to have labs that they work in. On the one hand, I will be able to continue dabbling in science, and hopefully making contributions directly, myself. On the other hand, the opportunity to think about science in a much bigger way is one that I had been really unconsciously pursuing for a little while. I’ve been involved in mentoring residents in other labs for about 7 or 8 years, helping them to forge their own research careers in their own areas.” The NIMH is directly funded by the US Government, and Gordon sees it as an opportunity to step away from the pressure to deliver results on a more profit-driven deadline. “One of the fundamental benefits of government is that we can fund long-term research, without the pressure of turning a profit. That’s important for science.” However, with the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States with united Republican government, the USA’s ongoing commitment to basic research might be in question. Gordon, however, believes that the results will speak for themselves. “I think the NIMH has always enjoyed bipartisan support”, he said, “and so I’m committed to and looking forward to working with the new administration to ensure that they understand the importance of mental health research, and how actually outstanding and hardworking folks within NIMH and in our extramural community really are.”
National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health
Joshua Gordon is the recently appointed head of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a component of the National Institutes of Health, an agency within the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Created in 1949, the NIMH is part of the larger National Institutes of Health. The NIMH is the largest organisation in the world concerned with mental illness and mental health research, managing around US$1·5 billion annually, through over 2000 grants to research institutions around the world. Gordon, aged 49 and married with two children, was born in the Washington, DC area, and his first interest in science was sparked by the public television science magazine, Nova. “When I was in middle school and early high school, they had a lot of programs on genetic engineering, which was a hot topic back then. I got excited about the notion that one could engineer the genome,” Gordon said. His interest in microbiology and biology led to an undergraduate degree from Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, and then on to an MD, PhD programme at the University of California, San Francisco, where he studied with J Michael Bishop shortly before his Nobel Prize win in 1989. In medical school, Gordon became interested in questions of consciousness and neurophilosophy. “When I learned more about neuroscience, which I really didn’t know that much about in college, it became apparent that you could answer some really fascinating questions about the way that the brain activity related to behaviour that were actually really satisfying”, Gordon said, “and at the same time I learned more about psychiatric illness and how devastating it was. Those two things combined, and I thought this is something that I’d like to pursue.” Earlier this autumn, Gordon called for “long-term inter disciplinary collaborations with theoreticians, mathe maticians, and physicists”. Gordon believes that this kind of collaborative synthesis of approaches can yield insights into how biological process function, and wants to use the NIMH to further a model-based approach towards neuroscience research. “I think there’s several different levels at which interactions between theoreticians, and mathematicians, and neuroscientists can help the field of mental health. At the very basic neuroscience level, it’s very challenging to understand how phenomena at different levels relate to each other. We can get very good at studying, for example, the cellular processes that regulate neuronal activity or synaptic plasticity”, Gordon said. Gordon’s PhD thesis pioneered methods used to study brain plasticity in the visual systems of mice. “We can understand, now, with the fantastic tools that have been developed, how activity within specific neural circuits generates patterns of behaviour. Linking across those two
Aaron van Dorn 279
Profile Joshua Gordon: an interdisciplinary approach to mental health
www.thelancet.com/psychiatry Vol 4 April 2017
levels is very challenging. One needs to make links across those levels. How the causes of psychiatric illness, be they environmental or genetic, act on cellular processes. We need to understand how those dysfunctional cellular processes lead to dysfunctional behaviours.” “Mathematical formulas can help us bridge those gaps”, Gordon argued. “You can build a model of cellular function, integrate that into a model of circuit function, and ask whether a particular dysfunction that’s seen in a psychiatric risk factor will lead to patterns of circuit dysfunction you might be able to observe in animal models or humans.” In 2004, Gordon joined Columbia University as an associate professor of psychiatry, and as a research psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, as well as in general psychiatric practice. In accepting the position as director of the NIMH, Gordon was forced to confront the difficult decision to step away from those commitments, particularly regarding the patients he’s treated for years and the research lab that occupied three-quarters of his time. “I wrestled with that a lot”, Gordon said. “One of things that convinced me, though, that it was an endeavour worth doing was talking to the other institute directors. All of whom, basically, came from labs of one kind or another, and several of whom continued to have labs that they work in. On the one hand, I will be able to continue dabbling in science, and hopefully making contributions directly, myself. On the other hand, the opportunity to think about science in a much bigger way is one that I had been really unconsciously pursuing for a little while. I’ve been involved in mentoring residents in other labs for about 7 or 8 years, helping them to forge their own research careers in their own areas.” The NIMH is directly funded by the US Government, and Gordon sees it as an opportunity to step away from the pressure to deliver results on a more profit-driven deadline. “One of the fundamental benefits of government is that we can fund long-term research, without the pressure of turning a profit. That’s important for science.” However, with the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States with united Republican government, the USA’s ongoing commitment to basic research might be in question. Gordon, however, believes that the results will speak for themselves. “I think the NIMH has always enjoyed bipartisan support”, he said, “and so I’m committed to and looking forward to working with the new administration to ensure that they understand the importance of mental health research, and how actually outstanding and hardworking folks within NIMH and in our extramural community really are.”
National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health
Joshua Gordon is the recently appointed head of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a component of the National Institutes of Health, an agency within the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Created in 1949, the NIMH is part of the larger National Institutes of Health. The NIMH is the largest organisation in the world concerned with mental illness and mental health research, managing around US$1·5 billion annually, through over 2000 grants to research institutions around the world. Gordon, aged 49 and married with two children, was born in the Washington, DC area, and his first interest in science was sparked by the public television science magazine, Nova. “When I was in middle school and early high school, they had a lot of programs on genetic engineering, which was a hot topic back then. I got excited about the notion that one could engineer the genome,” Gordon said. His interest in microbiology and biology led to an undergraduate degree from Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, and then on to an MD, PhD programme at the University of California, San Francisco, where he studied with J Michael Bishop shortly before his Nobel Prize win in 1989. In medical school, Gordon became interested in questions of consciousness and neurophilosophy. “When I learned more about neuroscience, which I really didn’t know that much about in college, it became apparent that you could answer some really fascinating questions about the way that the brain activity related to behaviour that were actually really satisfying”, Gordon said, “and at the same time I learned more about psychiatric illness and how devastating it was. Those two things combined, and I thought this is something that I’d like to pursue.” Earlier this autumn, Gordon called for “long-term inter disciplinary collaborations with theoreticians, mathe maticians, and physicists”. Gordon believes that this kind of collaborative synthesis of approaches can yield insights into how biological process function, and wants to use the NIMH to further a model-based approach towards neuroscience research. “I think there’s several different levels at which interactions between theoreticians, and mathematicians, and neuroscientists can help the field of mental health. At the very basic neuroscience level, it’s very challenging to understand how phenomena at different levels relate to each other. We can get very good at studying, for example, the cellular processes that regulate neuronal activity or synaptic plasticity”, Gordon said. Gordon’s PhD thesis pioneered methods used to study brain plasticity in the visual systems of mice. “We can understand, now, with the fantastic tools that have been developed, how activity within specific neural circuits generates patterns of behaviour. Linking across those two
Aaron van Dorn 279