She has explored the brain’s secrets for more than 50 years, delving deep into the genes, proteins and cells that help govern our emotions and moods, and our responses to pleasure and pain.
Credit: University of Michigan
She has explored the brain’s secrets for more than 50 years, delving deep into the genes, proteins and cells that help govern our emotions and moods, and our responses to pleasure and pain.
And today, Huda Akil, Ph.D., received the nation’s highest scientific honor – the National Medal of Science — for those contributions and their impact on humankind’s understanding of depression, anxiety, addiction and more.
Akil, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan Medical School and Michigan Neuroscience Institute, and her fellow awardees were honored at the White House in a ceremony with President Joe Biden. She is the eighth member of the U-M faculty to receive the medal.
“I am deeply honored, humbled and grateful,” said Akil, who is the Gardner C. Quarton Distinguished University Professor of Neurosciences in the U-M Department of Psychiatry and a research professor at MNI. “I’m especially grateful for all the opportunities the United States has given me to be a scientist and make contributions to our understanding of the brain.”
Akil’s road to the award began in Syria, where she was born, and Lebanon, where she discovered her passion for understanding the brain’s mysteries as an undergraduate majoring in psychology. She came to the United States 55 years ago for graduate studies, and has spent 45 years at U-M building a wide-ranging research program with her scientific partner and husband Stanley Watson, M.D., Ph.D., who is the Ralph Waldo Gerard Professor of Neurosciences and professor of psychiatry in the Medical School, and a research professor at MNI.
Together, they led what is now called MNI for more than 25 years and oversaw the research and training of hundreds of young neuroscientists, who came to be known as “Wakils.” Many of them now lead research programs of their own in universities worldwide.
Akil’s early work focused on understanding the brain’s own “natural painkillers” — called endogenous opioids — and how they interact with receptors on the surface of brain cells. Her team’s discoveries about these molecules and receptors laid the groundwork for many other scientists’ work to this day.
From there, Akil’s research grew into an exploration of the impacts of stress on the brain at the molecular level, and the genetic and cellular differences that may make someone more or less vulnerable to developing depression, anxiety or substance use disorders including opioid addiction.
Taken together, Akil says she believes the findings made by her team should give a message of hope about mental health.
“Mood and addictive disorders are a huge challenge in today’s society, but we are making great progress in understanding their causes and devising new strategies for treating them,” she said. “I am especially passionate about finding ways to prevent these illnesses before they take significant hold, and I hope to use whatever capabilities I have to make a difference on this front. I believe it can be done.”
In addition to her scientific achievements and leadership roles at U-M, Akil has been a scientific leader nationally, including terms as president of the Society for Neuroscience and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, and service on the advisory committee to the director of the National Institutes of Health.
She has won many honors, including election to both the Institute of Medicine, now called the National Academy of Medicine, and the National Academy of Sciences. She was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Alone or together with Watson, she has won numerous other prizes and honors.
As a result of the growing body of scientific knowledge about the biological roots of human behavior and mental health conditions, Akil says society’s attitudes have begun to change.
“The stigma associated with disorders such as depression, anxiety and addiction to opioids and other drugs continues to be a major challenge. But we have made significant progress in framing these disorders in biomedical terms and addressing them using scientific, evidence-based approaches,” she said.
“I think the public has embraced the idea that these disorders are the result of both biological predisposition and environmental factors. But that does not make them any less painful, often devastating and even deadly,” she added.
With policymakers at every level now focused on the rising rates and impacts of mental health conditions, the crisis of overdose deaths, and the need for more evidence-based care, she says now is the time for scientists to engage publicly.
“Science needs to partner with every facet of society, locally, nationally, and globally to fight these illnesses with every tool we have, while continuing to advance our knowledge and develop new strategies for better prevention and treatment.”
In addition to her husband, and her parents who nurtured her curiosity, Akil credited the key role of her research mentors John Liebeskind, Jack Barchas and Bernard Agranoff, and U-M as her scientific home. She also noted that she and Watson have even had the chance to collaborate scientifically with their children, who have both developed careers in medicine and neuroscience of their own.
About the National Medal of Science:
Established in 1959 by the U.S. Congress, the National Medal of Science is the highest recognition the nation can bestow on scientists and engineers. The presidential award is given to individuals deserving of special recognition by reason of their outstanding contributions to knowledge in the physical, biological, mathematical, engineering, or social and behavioral sciences, in service to the Nation. These broad areas include such disciplines as astronomy, chemistry, computer and information science and engineering, geoscience, materials research, and research on STEM education. The NMS Program is managed by the National Science Foundation.
The last time the Medal of Science was awarded was in 2016, for laureates selected in 2012 and 2014.
Also presented today were the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
Two other U-M Medical School faculty, both now deceased, have won the National Medal of Science: neuroanatomist Elizabeth Crosby, Ph.D. and geneticist James Neel, Ph.D. Current U-M faculty member Hyman Bass, Ph.D., won for mathematics research in 2012, and emeritus professor Robert Axelrod, Ph.D., won for political science and public policy research in 2014. Late U-M faculty members Horace Richard Crane, Ph.D., Donald Katz, Ph.D., and Emmett Leith, Ph.D. won for contributions in physics and engineering.
The headlines coming out of the Super Tuesday primaries have got it right. Barring cataclysmic changes, Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be the Republican and Democratic nominees for president in 2024.
With Nikki Haley’s withdrawal, there will be no more significantly contested primaries or caucuses—the earliest both parties’ races have been over since something like the current primary-dominated system was put in place in 1972.
The primary results have spotlighted some of both nominees’ weaknesses.
Donald Trump lost high-income, high-educated constituencies, including the entire metro area—aka the Swamp. Many but by no means all Haley votes there were cast by Biden Democrats. Mr. Trump can’t afford to lose too many of the others in target states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Majorities and large minorities of voters in overwhelmingly Latino counties in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley and some in Houston voted against Joe Biden, and even more against Senate nominee Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas).
Returns from Hispanic precincts in New Hampshire and Massachusetts show the same thing. Mr. Biden can’t afford to lose too many Latino votes in target states like Arizona and Georgia.
When Mr. Trump rode down that escalator in 2015, commentators assumed he’d repel Latinos. Instead, Latino voters nationally, and especially the closest eyewitnesses of Biden’s open-border policy, have been trending heavily Republican.
High-income liberal Democrats may sport lawn signs proclaiming, “In this house, we believe ... no human is illegal.” The logical consequence of that belief is an open border. But modest-income folks in border counties know that flows of illegal immigrants result in disorder, disease, and crime.
There is plenty of impatience with increased disorder in election returns below the presidential level. Consider Los Angeles County, America’s largest county, with nearly 10 million people, more people than 40 of the 50 states. It voted 71 percent for Mr. Biden in 2020.
Current returns show county District Attorney George Gascon winning only 21 percent of the vote in the nonpartisan primary. He’ll apparently face Republican Nathan Hochman, a critic of his liberal policies, in November.
Gascon, elected after the May 2020 death of counterfeit-passing suspect George Floyd in Minneapolis, is one of many county prosecutors supported by billionaire George Soros. His policies include not charging juveniles as adults, not seeking higher penalties for gang membership or use of firearms, and bringing fewer misdemeanor cases.
The predictable result has been increased car thefts, burglaries, and personal robberies. Some 120 assistant district attorneys have left the office, and there’s a backlog of 10,000 unprosecuted cases.
More than a dozen other Soros-backed and similarly liberal prosecutors have faced strong opposition or have left office.
St. Louis prosecutor Kim Gardner resigned last May amid lawsuits seeking her removal, Milwaukee’s John Chisholm retired in January, and Baltimore’s Marilyn Mosby was defeated in July 2022 and convicted of perjury in September 2023. Last November, Loudoun County, Virginia, voters (62 percent Biden) ousted liberal Buta Biberaj, who declined to prosecute a transgender student for assault, and in June 2022 voters in San Francisco (85 percent Biden) recalled famed radical Chesa Boudin.
Similarly, this Tuesday, voters in San Francisco passed ballot measures strengthening police powers and requiring treatment of drug-addicted welfare recipients.
In retrospect, it appears the Floyd video, appearing after three months of COVID-19 confinement, sparked a frenzied, even crazed reaction, especially among the highly educated and articulate. One fatal incident was seen as proof that America’s “systemic racism” was worse than ever and that police forces should be defunded and perhaps abolished.
2020 was “the year America went crazy,” I wrote in January 2021, a year in which police funding was actually cut by Democrats in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Denver. A year in which young New York Times (NYT) staffers claimed they were endangered by the publication of Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-Ark.) opinion article advocating calling in military forces if necessary to stop rioting, as had been done in Detroit in 1967 and Los Angeles in 1992. A craven NYT publisher even fired the editorial page editor for running the article.
Evidence of visible and tangible discontent with increasing violence and its consequences—barren and locked shelves in Manhattan chain drugstores, skyrocketing carjackings in Washington, D.C.—is as unmistakable in polls and election results as it is in daily life in large metropolitan areas. Maybe 2024 will turn out to be the year even liberal America stopped acting crazy.
Chaos and disorder work against incumbents, as they did in 1968 when Democrats saw their party’s popular vote fall from 61 percent to 43 percent.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.
VA Secretary Denis McDonough said on May 1, 2023, that the end of many other federal mandates “will not impact current policies at the Department of Veterans Affairs.”
He said the mandate was remaining for VA health care personnel “to ensure the safety of veterans and our colleagues.”
Mr. McDonough did not cite any studies or other data. A VA spokesperson declined to provide any data that was reviewed when deciding not to rescind the mandate. The Epoch Times submitted a Freedom of Information Act for “all documents outlining which data was relied upon when establishing the mandate when deciding to keep the mandate in place.”
The agency searched for such data and did not find any.
“The VA does not even attempt to justify its policies with science, because it can’t,” Leslie Manookian, president and founder of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, told The Epoch Times.
“The VA just trusts that the process and cost of challenging its unfounded policies is so onerous, most people are dissuaded from even trying,” she added.
The VA’s mandate remains in place to this day.
The VA’s website claims that vaccines “help protect you from getting severe illness” and “offer good protection against most COVID-19 variants,” pointing in part to observational data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that estimate the vaccines provide poor protection against symptomatic infection and transient shielding against hospitalization.
There have also been increasing concerns among outside scientists about confirmed side effects like heart inflammation—the VA hid a safety signal it detected for the inflammation—and possible side effects such as tinnitus, which shift the benefit-risk calculus.
President Joe Biden imposed a slate of COVID-19 vaccine mandates in 2021. The VA was the first federal agency to implement a mandate.
President Biden rescinded the mandates in May 2023, citing a drop in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. His administration maintains the choice to require vaccines was the right one and saved lives.
“Our administration’s vaccination requirements helped ensure the safety of workers in critical workforces including those in the healthcare and education sectors, protecting themselves and the populations they serve, and strengthening their ability to provide services without disruptions to operations,” the White House said.
Some experts said requiring vaccination meant many younger people were forced to get a vaccine despite the risks potentially outweighing the benefits, leaving fewer doses for older adults.
“By mandating the vaccines to younger people and those with natural immunity from having had COVID, older people in the U.S. and other countries did not have access to them, and many people might have died because of that,” Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine on leave from Harvard Medical School, told The Epoch Times previously.
The VA was one of just a handful of agencies to keep its mandate in place following the removal of many federal mandates.
“At this time, the vaccine requirement will remain in effect for VA health care personnel, including VA psychologists, pharmacists, social workers, nursing assistants, physical therapists, respiratory therapists, peer specialists, medical support assistants, engineers, housekeepers, and other clinical, administrative, and infrastructure support employees,” Mr. McDonough wrote to VA employees at the time.
“This also includes VA volunteers and contractors. Effectively, this means that any Veterans Health Administration (VHA) employee, volunteer, or contractor who works in VHA facilities, visits VHA facilities, or provides direct care to those we serve will still be subject to the vaccine requirement at this time,” he said. “We continue to monitor and discuss this requirement, and we will provide more information about the vaccination requirements for VA health care employees soon. As always, we will process requests for vaccination exceptions in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and policies.”
The version of the shots cleared in the fall of 2022, and available through the fall of 2023, did not have any clinical trial data supporting them.
A new version was approved in the fall of 2023 because there were indications that the shots not only offered temporary protection but also that the level of protection was lower than what was observed during earlier stages of the pandemic.
Ms. Manookian, whose group has challenged several of the federal mandates, said that the mandate “illustrates the dangers of the administrative state and how these federal agencies have become a law unto themselves.”
A new study indicates that problems with iron levels in the bloodstream likely trigger chronic inflammation and other conditions associated with the post-COVID phenomenon. The findings, published on March 1 in Nature Immunology, could offer new ways to treat or prevent the condition.
Long COVID Patients Have Low Iron Levels
Researchers at the University of Cambridge pinpointed low iron as a potential link to long-COVID symptoms thanks to a study they initiated shortly after the start of the pandemic. They recruited people who tested positive for the virus to provide blood samples for analysis over a year, which allowed the researchers to look for post-infection changes in the blood. The researchers looked at 214 samples and found that 45 percent of patients reported symptoms of long COVID that lasted between three and 10 months.
In analyzing the blood samples, the research team noticed that people experiencing long COVID had low iron levels, contributing to anemia and low red blood cell production, just two weeks after they were diagnosed with COVID-19. This was true for patients regardless of age, sex, or the initial severity of their infection.
According to one of the study co-authors, the removal of iron from the bloodstream is a natural process and defense mechanism of the body.
But it can jeopardize a person’s recovery.
“When the body has an infection, it responds by removing iron from the bloodstream. This protects us from potentially lethal bacteria that capture the iron in the bloodstream and grow rapidly. It’s an evolutionary response that redistributes iron in the body, and the blood plasma becomes an iron desert,” University of Oxford professor Hal Drakesmith said in a press release. “However, if this goes on for a long time, there is less iron for red blood cells, so oxygen is transported less efficiently affecting metabolism and energy production, and for white blood cells, which need iron to work properly. The protective mechanism ends up becoming a problem.”
The research team believes that consistently low iron levels could explain why individuals with long COVID continue to experience fatigue and difficulty exercising. As such, the researchers suggested iron supplementation to help regulate and prevent the often debilitating symptoms associated with long COVID.
“It isn’t necessarily the case that individuals don’t have enough iron in their body, it’s just that it’s trapped in the wrong place,” Aimee Hanson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge who worked on the study, said in the press release. “What we need is a way to remobilize the iron and pull it back into the bloodstream, where it becomes more useful to the red blood cells.”
The research team pointed out that iron supplementation isn’t always straightforward. Achieving the right level of iron varies from person to person. Too much iron can cause stomach issues, ranging from constipation, nausea, and abdominal pain to gastritis and gastric lesions.
1 in 5 Still Affected by Long COVID
COVID-19 has affected nearly 40 percent of Americans, with one in five of those still suffering from symptoms of long COVID, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Long COVID is marked by health issues that continue at least four weeks after an individual was initially diagnosed with COVID-19. Symptoms can last for days, weeks, months, or years and may include fatigue, cough or chest pain, headache, brain fog, depression or anxiety, digestive issues, and joint or muscle pain.
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