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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Title should be "...changes gene expression levels"

So they took a cohort of baby rats, exposed one group of rats to 'stress', smacked another group of rats in the head hard enough to cause brain injury, had a control group which was 'unstressed', then sliced up their brains to measure levels of protein expression. Some rats were not chopped up and their 'natural behavior' was monitored.

This is apparently valuable research because it shows that traumatized and injured rats have different protein expression patterns in their brains from non-traumatized and injured rats and also behave differently as adults. This is applicable to humans because...???

Takeaways: (1) torturing rodents for dubious results is ethically questionable and (2) what a waste of money and resources.

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> This is applicable to humans because...???

We don't know if it is applicable to humans. Some of it might, some of it might not. First you figure out how rat brains work and then you can check if human brains work the same way.

You are right that we are interested in human brains, and how to heal them. The reason we don't do these experiments on humans is mainly ethical. Simply put we value human lives more than rats. There are also logistical challenges with humans. They take too long to grow up and cost too much to raise.

> torturing rodents for dubious results

What makes the results dubious? I'm not an expert on brain research. Is it just that you have a dislike to animal analog studies? Is the gene expression changes caused by early-life stress and brain injury well understood enough that there are no open questions the experiment might answer?

No protein work. mRNA assayed.

Applicable to humans because head trauma is unfortunately very common in infants, toddlers, and children. Developing effective treatments of pediatric TBI and adverse childhood events would be a real boon to humanity.

It would literally save my life, as I would actually be able to live mine and do all the things I'm capable of instead of feeling partially locked in.

Im glad this is brought up. This research feels like dots being vaguely connected together. What am I even supposed to do with this info?

> What am I even supposed to do with this info?

Seems like a weird question. Are you a researcher in a related field? Then maybe incorporate this finding into your models for how things work or tweak your future experiments based on this data.

Are you an unaffiliated Rust developer? Then you're not really supposed to do anything with this.. it's not particularly for you. Read it if you're intellectually curious, to expand your knowledge and understanding of the world in general? Or ignore it if you don't care?

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