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Your weekly dose of drug facts while dispelling fiction
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You're listening to locally produced programming created in KUNV Studios on Public Radio. KUNV 91.5. Welcome to another episode of The Chemical Collective. The Chemical
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Collective offers you your weekly dose of drug facts while dispelling fiction. I'm Kendra McLaughlin and I'm April Contreras and I'm Elena Quino. So you
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guys, I was looking, today is our 14th episode.
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14th.
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Yes.
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We're starting to get to the point where we're wrapping up the semester. It's been a long time coming, feels like. I don't know, it went kind of fast and slow at the same time. What have we been talking about for a semester long?
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Ton of different drugs, ton of different compounds, ranging from what I think our first episode was on the psychedelic renaissance.
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Yes.
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Something that I hold near and dear to my heart. Yes.
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We talked about caffeine, another favorite. Another classic, yeah. Yeah.
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Two of us are drinking caffeine right now.
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I'm sure you got a ton this morning.
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I am not.
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We were talking about some different types of alcohols.
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I think we hit up-
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Two kinds? Yeah, whiskey, there was tequila.
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Tequila.
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Tequila, I missed that one.
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Yeah, that was a good one.
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That was fun. What else did we talk about? We talked about the mandrake root, some delirium. Yes, yes. That was fun, a little spoopy.
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Is there any of the episodes that you think stands out for you? I think for me it has to be the mandrake root. I think for sure that was only a plant that I only ever associated with the fictional world of Harry Potter. So then having like the realistic version of it brought forth in this modality was like pretty interesting. And like, it's a very useful, very interesting herb. So it's like, why not learn more about it for sure. And also could be deadly. But no, same sentiments. I thought that it was very interesting to be able to research some of these plants or substances I wouldn't normally gravitate to outside of Harry Potter. It just gave me a reason to say Harry Potter. Do you want to say it one more time? You know, but Harry Potter, no, I'm kidding. But yeah, ultimately, the common theme of these kind of substances being around for like centuries, like long periods of time, and how they've been used and how society's viewpoints have changed over time on these different types of substances, whether they are medicinal or in a ceremony, I think was the biggest part of this semester that I'm going to take away from learning about all these different drugs. Yeah, I agree. And I think when we started the show, that was a very big component, you know, to destigmatize drugs, to destigmatize medicine in a way that, you know, provides facts. And I think kind of a running narrative that we've had, too, is the idea of modern Westernized medicine, you know, we think of drugs here in a particular way, going to the pharmacy, going to a doctor to get a pack of pills to treat something as fast as possible, compared to maybe, you know, more traditional medicine or non-Westernized medicine, where it's very plant-based. And I know that there's always that, also stigmatization that comes along with the idea of giving someone just a pill and not a skill, if you will. Oh, that was a triple run.
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Yeah, I was like, that run.
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Bars.
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But the idea that some of these substances like psychedelics, you do get this long-lasting benefit that I think goes overlooked when the people are just saying, you're only getting a pill, there's nothing that you'll get for a long period of time. That's actually not the same kind of concept anymore. You're getting something that's rewiring the brain essentially to be able to pick up new skills or something like that. Yeah, and there's a lot involved in that type of, you know, like healing. So it's not just taking the medicine and, you know, novel research is being done to figure out, you know, how, what parts of the trip are needed, what type of compound is best for a particular person with a specific disorder? What are the potential adverse effects? And, you know, the whole treatment with psychedelics involves, yeah, again, not just taking the medicine, but intensive therapy, preparing for taking the medicine and the therapy. After you're done with the medicine component, more therapy integration back into society, figuring out how long that will last and rates of relapse and on and on and on compared to you know the idea of here take this pill and go away if you come back I'll just yeah it's like more that fast thing like you want something quick it's easy to do take the pill you're done versus you have to work for some of these herbal stuff like you have to do it multiple times there's like there's like a whole process that involved with the psychedelics you have to do extra therapy that you don't think about if you're taking some other sort of herbal remedy, like that takes work, because you have to prepare it properly, take it so many times a week, and it's like a slower process, but it has a more, yeah, it has a more like long lasting effect. Because it's not just one thing it's affecting, it's affecting multiple things, and people aren't ready for like that type of therapy just yet. We kind of have gone away from that, because we're like, we're in a rush, we're busy, we have things to do, let's pill, pop it in, and we're done, hopefully. Would you guys say that the current direction for where all of this science is headed is not only being more holistic, but more individually focused, like getting people specific substances at a specific dose for that specific lifestyle? Do you think we're trying to get towards individual type medicine? Is that the ultimate goal that all of this is headed towards? I would say yes, and I think it's being done in two different camps, because we do have the personalized medicine, where it's like, we're trying to genetically engineer drugs for like individual people and based off their genetics. And then there's like the herbal remedy stuff where it's like you understand what you're missing, like with your body, like if you're missing nutrients, if you're missing whatever, and then you supplement that with specific herbs, specific vitamins, specific, by eating certain fruits, certain herbs, et cetera. So like, I think we are doing that. I think people are taking very different approaches to that. More Western, it's like, let's get into like the science of it, quote unquote. We're like, look at genetics. Let's see how that plays a part. And let's play on your genetics to see what'll help you the best versus holistic. It's like, we know there's something wrong. Let's figure it out. Let's take more fruits. Let's do more veggies. Let's do certain herbs and spices and plants, etc., etc. That'll help you do that in the end. But I agree. What about you guys? April? April O'Hara Well, taking it back, I think, yes, it depends on who you are and the research you're doing and what your motivation is. But our show is called the Chemical Collective. There's this idea of community in healing with a lot of these medicines that is just not a part of a lot of treatments. And I think just by having discourse, learning about medicine, what you're taking in your body, can, you know, go leaps and bounds. I think that's the basic core and component is just like having knowledge, right? To be able to learn, have the fact from the fiction, make a choice that's well educated. And for you. Yeah, and having that perspective, because honestly, a lot of the substances that we did discuss, finding out that they come from some natural substance and understanding how it changes in our body and in our mind to get different effects. I think just being transparent like that, I've been, my eyes have been open wide ever since then.
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I'm like, well, what's the base of this? What's the root of this? Pun intended. Yeah, I was like plants, roots. And I think that really speaks to just the diversity of different types of compounds. There's so many plants and medicines that we could have talked about. We had like a massive list of topics every week that it was really kind of hard to pick one each time.
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Yeah, yeah, I agree.
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Yeah, is there
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Any types of perspectives that you guys think that the field as a whole like neuroscience we come together to answer these big questions regarding the brain and I remember, you know, luckily April she got to go to a super super cool conference where there was an example of this where like leaders of a specific realm of the field come together to start making like criteria for things. Did you see any of that happening in real time recently? Yeah so while last week's episode was on tequila I happened to be in Mexico, Cancun specifically for the International Society for Serotonin Research Conference, ISSR. And it's this biannual conference that happens next time it's going to be in Vienna, Austria. And there were about 200 people in attendance. Okay, this might seem like a lot, but when you contrast it to Society for Neuroscience, which has like smaller, like football fields of posters. This was a much more intimate conference and everybody was there to just talk about serotonin and you know something that struck me right away was you know when you speak to someone on the street about a neurotransmitter or brain chemical serotonin is probably at the top of the list, wouldn't you say? Like if you were to talk about anybody, they think about serotonin before glutamate or GABA, which those are probably the two that pop up in our head first, right? Serotonin is probably number one on their list. And everybody talks about it. Everybody has an idea of its function. But at the conference, when it's experts on serotonin all in a room for six days talking about serotonin in the brain, in the gut, how we can change serotonin transmission to treat depression or substance use. You really get this idea of like, yeah, we really have no idea what it does. We know it does things, but it just really like hit me in the face that considering that this is one of the oldest neurotransmitters, there are so many questions about it. On one hand, I think that's exciting. It's kind of like still uncharted territory where they still need researchers like us that are young scientists that are trying to figure out these questions that have been around for a long time. We need new perspectives. We need, you know, different approaches. Concepts of like getting those prodromal kind of therapeutics in the mix for different types of disorders of the brain has always been a topic of, you know, discussion. One that I'm always interested in understanding more of, being able to find certain biomarkers, if you will, to indicate changes in the brain long before we start to see those changes in, like, for instance, like motor outcomes and degenerative disorders. I've always found super fascinating. And I think conferences like those, like where you get to intimately talk to people about specific problems and then as a group discern what major questions are where all of our resources should be allocated is a super cool thing. Yeah, and I was really pleased to see, you know, talks on serotonin in the gut, the gut was our first brain, you know, there was a good amount of discourse on sex differences, which, you know, sometimes we don't really pay attention to right away in science, we make sure all of our science is done on males. This is all the same. Everything is the same.
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Yep. There was a few talks on that. And you know, the development of serotonergic neurons, like where they come from, where they're going to go. There's like a lot of diversity in there that can be unpacked that can probably help figure
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out how to pro-dramatically diagnose people or treat people with novel therapies. So it was really exciting.
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Was there like any common themes that you can speak to that you saw like, oh, there was like a really great symposium where people were focusing on this specific mechanism or something that you heard a lot while you were there? Mostly like transmission. So how to keep serotonin in the receptor, how to make sure it's gone when it needs to be. That was like a major theme. There was a whole symposium on psychedelics, which was pretty awesome. That was really exciting. Yeah, so there are different camps, I think, but in general, the idea was just, we love serotonin, come and talk about it.
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Let's talk about it.
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Absolutely awesome.
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No, but you brought up a really good point earlier, but like the fact that you walk up to a person, they have like this idea that they know what this drug is and really like, we honestly, there's so many drugs out there that people are using that we truthfully don't fully understand. Yeah and we know a lot but I guess right but there's a lot every day we're learning a little bit more that we didn't think about before like with serotonin psychedelics has been around forever but yet you go to a serotonin conference and it's like well we really don't know a lot like the gut is a new thing studying serotonin in the gut no one ever not many people were doing that before and even now I think it's a relatively small camp. So it's like that idea that we think we know, but we truthfully don't, and we forget where things are coming from, which is really important. And I think you brought up a really good point with that, because it's like, there's a lot that we don't know and that we're still learning in conferences and radio shows like this, honestly. Let us know that we really need to be a little bit more careful about what we ingest in general.
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Was that another pun?
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How many puns? I should be keeping a tally.
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You know, we need to drink caffeine every time. I don't have caffeine on me. I definitely left mine. I have water. Whatever you have, take a drink. But I mean, it's very clear that the brain is the most complex thing that we have on our body and you can ask a million questions a million ways and we'll always be able to kind of break it down even further, break it down even further. But the overarching big questions about how certain things affect the brain and how that affects behavior, I think are like, like kind of those giant umbrella things that we're after, right? Like those big questions that are going to help people that are struggling with some sort of disorder and either neurodevelopmental or neurodegenerative, whatever it is, like how we can help people, like that big question. I always think that that's important to keep in perspective because even though we do go to these conferences and we do have these small camps, ultimately we have a bigger question question in mind that will kind of propel that area of knowledge or that gap in the field a little bit more than just incrementally at times. So I think that that's a cool perspective throughout your career to keep in mind. Like sometimes I get really into the weeds of something that I'm studying, my specific little mitochondria that I spend most of my day looking at, but trying to tie it back to something bigger.
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Yeah, like what's the point?
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Yeah, what is the point? Why should my grandma care about what I'm looking at in this microscope? Why am I looking at this? Why am I doing this? Why am I spending hours and hours and hours on this? And then you forget the big picture.
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Yeah.
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And so you're forced to look at it and you're like, oh, okay, let me backtrack. Let me go back to the kindergarten way of thinking about life.
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Yeah, well, that's important if we're like, like we just got done receiving like notification about funding from the Graduate College at UNLV. The big picture and having a very good story and narrative is really important for funding applications for
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this and like the NIH and things like that, right? Yeah, I think ultimately having a clear story not only helps you as an upcoming researcher, it helps you translate your work and its importance to people that need to know it. So we're talking to, hopefully, the community of UNLV or Nevada, and we're trying to get across how things work in the brain. And being able to say that plainly is a skill. And it's one that I'm still working on myself. Yeah. And why hide behind big words and terminology? The whole point is to dispel information and make it accessible. Yeah. Because then the public, who we are a part of, can make informed decisions about whatever, whether it's about science or not, right? Just how there's different kind of factions within neuroscience. I ultimately honestly believe that being a neuroscientist is translational to other fields like engineering or whatever. And, and, and, you know, my wildest dreams, I see us going back to simpler times where we're all working together in our own little quadrants to build a rocket ship or something, I don't know. But ultimately being able to talk to everyone in layman terms, I can understand what the engineer is trying to tell me, they can understand what I'm trying to tell them,
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that'd be awesome.
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Yeah.
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That's definitely a skill, because even me, I'm behind a computer all day, programming, doing any sort of thing behind the computer. Literally speaking a different language. Literally a whole different language. So it's hard when you have to come back and like, I don't know, why am I looking at this waveform 100 times a day? Like, what am I trying to do with it? Like, why am I looking at this image? Like, what's the point of it? Like, why am I trying to get all these? So I think that's a great answer. And like you, you do have a point, like, our field that we're in has so many different components from other fields, from physics, from engineering, like you have a whole project based off this engineering theory, and then you've applied it to living things. So we're able to pull from a lot of different fields. And a lot of people can, they just don't think to pull outside of what their little area is. Like, what are they doing? Can this help me? We don't think about that interconnectivity between the different science fields and how they could benefit each other a lot of times. Yeah, you brought up a beautiful kind of intersection where science is meeting coding. And we see a lot of the stuff that April and I were talking earlier about like AI being brought into almost every realm of everything and seeing how that can, you know, intersect with what we're doing on a day-to-day basis as far as researchers.
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Yeah, it seems like AI and big data are gonna be really important
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for at least our careers in the future. It's here to stay for sure.
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Yeah. Yeah.
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No, like we're seeing the importance now with things like chatGBT and autoGBT, which is something that our mentor wants me to start dabbling into this summer. So it'll be interesting to see how that works. I've never tried it before. ChatGBT is going to be a massive tool for all of us now sitting here in this room, like the things that we could do with it, just to like kickstart what we're already doing. Because like I've heard that people are starting to use Chad GBT to lay like the foundations of a code. So you get like the bare skeleton of it and then you kind of kind of go in and add your specific details and kind of build from it. But like even if you're just writing a normal piece of paper, you can get stuff from everywhere. I am curious if there's anything that you are able to share with us. You've been working firsthand with bridging these two worlds of coding and working on things. Do you think that it has been easier to create this code and use it in the long run? Or have you been able to see immediate gratification from using this in your own work? Is it worth it? I think so, yes, honestly. I've recently started using code to look at a specific structure in the neuron known as AIS. It's really important in electrical signaling. I've been able to use that and essentially, drastically diminish the amount of time needed to analyze a specific structure and that's through an image so I can look at an image with hundreds of them and very quickly pull out the data that I need versus before. It would literally take you days to weeks just to get the same amount of data out so it's there it's coming. In my regard I see I definitely see its utility. Oh yeah and it helps to have because like I obviously just started using the Python but it helps to have like the hands-on experience as I know what I'm doing, I know what I'm looking at, and I know how I need to get there from a hand perspective. I know what I need to do to get to this point. Now how can I make it so that a computer can do the exact same thing, because I know exactly what needs to be done to get there. So I think that helps. I think that's important, because as good as AI is getting right now, I'm not completely convinced that it can eliminate the kind of like human aspect of all the research that we do. Absolutely not. Being able to go back and double check on what it's doing is super important, I think. No, I'd agree. Because even now, like, computers, and this is like, this is the thing I heard forever ago, like computers are only as smart as what the person using them or may created them is. So like, if the person is super smart, they can only do so much and tell the computer to do so many things. However, the computer is only going to do what it's told to do. It's not going to sit there and use pink to wish. Good point. That's a little bit more. We're not quite there yet. So maybe in like the next 20, 40 years, who knows? There's going to be some kind of return to revenge of toasters. I'm not sure. AI toaster? Dude, some of the really scientific toasters, anyways, I digress. But no, I think it's always important that like, just because we have the really cool AI stuff coming into play, like you still have to verify, like trust, but you need to verify and make sure it's actually doing what you think it's doing. And it's doing it faithfully. I have a question for you guys. So we just discussed that we're still trying to answer questions that we've had for decades, like regarding like serotonin, for instance, right? At the same time, we're sitting here getting super, super advanced with AI technologies and all sorts of things. And we're just trying to answer that same question, just using a fancier ruler, if you will. Do you think that ultimately it will help us? Do you think that us advancing our tools is going to be able to answer the questions or are we just kind of going in a circle not answering, asking the right question? Yeah, it depends on the person with the tool. I think it definitely depends. If it saves you a lot of time so that you can allocate resources to work on something else and bring things together, have that idea and vision, then yes. But if you just expect AI to solve all your problems or give you a PhD, no. I agree with April. I think there's a limit to what it can do. It can definitely help with the analysis. Like, if you can put in the work beforehand, everything is good. Let someone else do the analysis or something else. Do the math and all the analysis for you, and you're just like, let me get to the next step. Let me progress this further. You can drastically cut down the amount of time, and then we can look at more things in a shorter period of time. But it's definitely not the end-all, be-all of things. That's a beautiful thought that like innovation will come from ideas. It'll come from, you know, inspiration or a spark that comes from people like us or people willing to sit and think about a question for a very long time.
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Mm-hmm. And a ton of different ways.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Yeah. I don't know. I think, again, I keep circling this back to the idea of community, a collective, neuroscience is an interdisciplinary community with tons of different cool tools that allows us to ask some very awesome questions. It's kind of a privilege to be able to be doing this type of work. It's a privilege to be able to meet here every week to talk about a cool compound, learn new things about it and tell the public about it. And, you know, this kind of just like makes waves for, you know, other people, for me, for us to kind of just continue sharing knowledge and people can do with it what they will. That opens the door for a lot of people because now there's this new theory or thought that they hadn't thought that they hadn't even occurred to them before. And I was like, maybe I can run with that. Maybe I can investigate this a little bit more, do something else with it or spin it, see what I can get out of it. I couldn't agree more. For sure. Being a part of neuroscience is a very rewarding career field so far. And the chance to collaborate with, you know, not only other disciplines, but people, walks of life has been a blast. But it looks like we have about reached our time for today. I want to thank you both for such an amazing discussion as always. Yeah, and thanks to those who are coming to The Chemical Collective amazing discussion as always. Yeah, and thanks to those who are coming to The Chemical Collective
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to get your weekly dose of facts while dispelling fiction.