[Feb 2018]
Dear CZI Science Leadership:
Thank you for naming one of your awards after Dr. Ben Barres. Dr. Barres was kind enough to exchange several messages with me just last July, and his intellectual power and passion for solving the problems in neurodegeneration and inflammation shone through….
The crux of the issue is the “conventional wisdom” of only funding basic science. Your website text is explicit in not funding translational or clinical work. Yes, bench results are faster, leading to more celebrations of accomplishment. But I’d like to suggest to your team that the hardest, messiest, longest and least rewarding work is in the actual clinical trials of patients, not in computational or in vitro or animal models.
If we are to see impacts on neurodegeneration in our lifetimes, I respectfully submit that your group think about funding some clinical initiatives, based on empiric approaches developed decades ago in the early days of cancer therapeutics, before computers or clinical molecular genetics. That was the foundation that lead us to curing over 90% of childhood leukemia these days, but it started when every child died.
Yours,
Ron Louie, MD
[image NIH public domain: medical training]