Animal Research

[outlier]

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I apologize for the really long post, but I've never posted before so I'm not good at being concise. I'm going to be starting an MD-PhD program this year, and I'm really interested in cognitive neuroscience. All my previous research experience (5 years) has been in humans-- behavioral and neuroimaging studies. But I've become disillusioned with human studies because you don't get the degree of control you get in more reductionist research. Also, I'm ready to learn something totally different.

When I read studies from other labs, I'm always most fascinated by the ones involving neuronal recordings from awake behaving animals. But I don't think I can do animal research, at least not in mammals. I'm not against animal research, but I think it would be very difficult for me emotionally to do it myself. I could probably work with non-mammals (although I would probably find it difficult to work with birds too), but of course the further away you get from mammals the less "cognitive" the neuroscience is.

I'm willing to move away from traditional cognitive neuroscience, as long as the research I do ties into higher-level issues in humans in some way. For example, I really liked one lab where they do neural recordings in locusts and look at neural coding of olfactory signals. This can provide an understanding of the basic mechanisms of neural coding, which be tied in to issues of perception and consciousness in humans. But that's only one lab, and I don't know if I'll get into that school, and I can't find other labs that do similar things. Does anyone know of similar types of research that I can look into (especially at Columbia, because that's where I'll probably end up)? It always seems to be done in mammals!! 🙁

Thanks for the help.

 

[URHere]

Just one piece of advice: don't write off research in mammals until you have tried or at least observed it.

I was in a similar position a few years back. I was a vegetarian and hard-core animal rights person...but I wanted to work in neuroscience. I decided to take a summer to try it and I made the transition between working with humans and working in mice. Since then I've worked in rats and monkeys as well. It really isn't as heartless as I once thought.

You never know if you can handle it or not until you try it, so I would suggest giving it a shot. There's no reason to shut out entire fields of research that interest you until you're sure you can't deal with them.

 

[outlier]

Thanks for the advice. The only problem is, I guess I'm more ambivalent about the ethics of animal research than I let on. I definitely support it for research that is directly medically-related, but I'm very iffy about using animals to explore how the brain works in a way that will build our knowledge base but only indirectly help with medical problems in the future. I wouldn't feel free to design an experiment just because it was interesting, but I would feel like there had to be a very specific direct benefit. Of course, maybe that would be a good thing, especially for an MD-PhD student.

My plan right now is to try non-mammal animal research first, even if it's far from cognitive, and then if I decide it is boring and too unrelated to the issues that i'm most interested in, then I would try the mammal research.