Gadgetory

you a lot of people they they feel like if they have to go see a doctor there should be like something really wrong with them write something you know very manifest very prevalent like something you can see right off the bat like you have a broken hand all right but it's okay you can go to the doctor you have a broken leg you need stitches you know go to the doctor but they feel like something that's internal they kind of see as a weakness we impulsed I have a very high rate of depression clinical depression and then there is this very big social stigma people don't want to speak about it people don't want to mention it people don't want even to speak about family members will happen you're in the u.s. we have all races and nationalities it's sort of a melting pot which has many benefits that the university appreciates but it also from a genetics point of view is a big a big problem if so much variability from someone who's from an Asian from a Jewish from a Middle Eastern from an African background it's hard to see you know what's the effect of any one gene Palestinians have been there for a very long time and this fact makes them genetically uniform and the fact that you can study a genetically informed population is is a great opportunity in terms of research you can get rid of any confounding variable you know and feel the weight of sad and hopeless anxious only I talked to my doctor in the US so many people are on one or more antidepressant medications you don't even need to go to a psychiatrist here's your report that you're sad they'll give you a prescription for prozac or zoloft once you have someone that's been on one or more antidepressants and you're trying to understand what's going on in their thinking and reasoning skills you don't know is it the disease is it the depression or is it the medication the quality of life here is I mean it's bad it's not the best finances are bad so everything is against people coming back here if you look at the situation in Palestine we not only lack basic facilities for biomedical research but we also like basic facilities for clinical care they don't have a lot of equipment they don't have laboratories they don't have a lot of brain imaging research magnets but one thing they do have is a lot of patients who are undiagnosed and unmedicated and that's a gold mine all right I send you all they do reason a bit of the scripts on our depression work and I hope that all of you have look at that every Monday I'm seventh at 730am New Jersey timing i'm here in the lab at rutgers to discuss progress on research discuss scientific topics and sometimes give lectures all of this began back in about 2008 with a friend and a colleague of mine Adele misc who is the leading Palestinian neurologist he had told me of his dream to build neuroscience and neurology and psychiatry for the Palestinians in the West Bank looking about the needs of our societies and our people here in Palestine we start to build this narrow sense love bananas University he tried to recruit some students to work with us to be the labor and it was very hard because medical students don't have a lot of free time and it was very hard to find any any student willing to work for free on a project that most of them thought would go nowhere so we wound up with three students of those three initial students in 2008 one of them turned out to be an absolute superstar whose dream himself was to be a neuroscientist but had never seen any way in which he could do that growing up in the West Bank I've always wanted to be a physicist a nuclear physicist unfortunately that never happened so after finishing high school I was like rankings number 73 on the west bank out of 35,000 students my father is a professor biochemistry and he was telling me physics in Palestine is not a good combo go for something else as an eager young medical student who wants to become a researcher there were no opportunities at all and I kind of realized that if I want to become a researcher I should build that on my own we were like ten students we were selected from 27 students candidates so I was the lucky one because I was number 10 ever since I was little I wanted to like to discover something new and my name would be remembered after discovering it that's like my you could say holy grail or something like that something i want i entered the medical school because i believe the most notable thing you can do is to relieve patients suffering but when you understand how really the disease happen and the aspects that affects you're not treating an individual but you can this way you can help the whole society you have a lot of people from the older generation and they would tell us why research people need food or people need this and people need that they don't really see the need for science and math and an education in their their own countries what we want to is to invest in people and make sure that we're investing in people on the long run so that they can come back to palestine and help expand the initiative and hopefully ultimately establish a neuroscience institute we're not just going outside to to like pursue a PhD or specialty and never get back north to get back here because they know what's going on clearly by creating even a modest biomedical research program that's indigenous that's based at Al codes and other universities you create a sticky situation for the student sticky in a good way meaning that they're more likely to come back because many of them would like to be able to both have a clinical practice be able to pursue internationally respected research and yet be within their families and culture with few natural resources and very modest space the future of Palestine cannot be based on politics but rather the human capital building brainpower to improve brain health which can turn a dusty empty dark room four years later into a room full of energy motivation and individuals were willing to make a change and shape the future of Palestine thank you we faced a lot of skepticism it we still face a lot of skepticism and look at it as as an opportunity for us to know how we can become better they look at us like you want to do what you know you know we don't have roads and when you show them that we have our collaborators are Harvard University and Rutgers University all these very well known universities they ease into the idea like wow you know these guys actually they've done something we have trained around 35 Palestinian medical students we have published four papers we have four more under review we don't like the brains we don't like the ambition we don't like the available of a smart people we only want to put things together and have support of elite institutions worldwide and thanks God we had Rutgers to support us in this regard it doesn't really matter what people say it doesn't really matter what people think it only matters what me as a person or anybody who's doing something believes in my dad still thinks I'm crazy but I'm not against the idea of being crazy because everybody who achieved something important in history was crazy you