Must reads

• A November 10, 2014 The Hill article reported that "House Democrats on Monday urged Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to include more funding for the National Institutes of Health in the next government funding bill." According to the article, "In a letter to Boehner and Pelosi, more than 100 House Democrats called for setting NIH's funding level to the agency's pre-sequester level, adjusted for inflation. "We are concerned that, over the last 10 years, the federal government's contributions toward basic research at NIH have consistently failed to keep pace with inflation," they wrote. The House Democrats argued that the NIH needs more funds to develop research for cures and treatments for diseases like Alzheimer's, cancer and Ebola." Read the letter here.
• A November 10, 2014 BillMoyers.com opinion piece by Cori Bargmann underscored the need for the government to invest in large scale brain research to tackle issues like Alzheimer's and autism. According to Bargmann, "It will not be easy, and it cannot be done on a small scale — which is why we need a presidential initiative, not scientific business-as-usual. Developing new tools will require the best neuroscientists, geneticists, engineers, physicists, computer scientists and medical researchers to work together in new ways. It will take at least 10 years, and it will require resources. Only governments can commit vast sums of money over long periods of time, betting that after the fundamental work is done, they can look to their partners in medicine, engineering and the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries to turn that science into directed applications and treatments." Cori Bargmann is the Torsten N. Wiesel Professor and co-Director of the Shelby White and Leon Levy Center for Mind, Brain and Behavior at the Rockefeller University in New York, and has been an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1995.

• A November 11, 2014 The Root article highlighted the impact of dementia on the African American community and highlighted the story of one male caregiver dealing with the issue firsthand. According to the article, "With African-American women being more likely to care for elderly family members at home, Todd Thurn is a rarity: a man who became the primary caregiver when his mother, Alice Shurn, was diagnosed with dementia."

• A November 10, 2014 New York Times article highlighted the efforts of researchers to learn "how little we know about the brain." According to the article, "Scientists have puzzled out profoundly important insights about how the brain works, like the way the mammalian brain navigates and remembers places, work that won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for a British-American and two Norwegians. Yet the growing body of data — maps, atlases and so-called connectomes that show linkages between cells and regions of the brain — represents a paradox of progress, with the advances also highlighting great gaps in understanding. So many large and small questions remain unanswered. How is information encoded and transferred from cell to cell or from network to network of cells? Science found a genetic code but there is no brain-wide neural code; no electrical or chemical alphabet exists that can be recombined to say “red” or “fear” or “wink” or “run.” And no one knows whether information is encoded differently in various parts of the brain." [Behind paywall - PDF attached] 
• A November 5, 2014 Nature article reported on advances in developing molecules that can "sneak through the brain-blood barrier." According to the article, "Delivering medications to the brain could become easier, thanks to molecules that can escort drugs through the notoriously impervious sheath that separates blood vessels from neurons. In a proof-of-concept study in monkeys, biologists used the system to reduce levels of the protein amyloid-β, which accumulates in the brain plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease."