Tuesday, October 15th, 2013

Time	Event
4:00a	Fighting for social justice Ask senior Cory Hernandez how MIT can improve, and he won’t hesitate to tell you. Whether the subject is the Institute’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer (LGBTQ) community or its political science department, Hernandez is full of ideas, and is not afraid to speak them. With a passion for American history and for social equality, Hernandez dreams of serving on the U.S. Supreme Court. As he nears the completion of a double major in political science and American studies and a master’s in political science, Hernandez looks forward to law school and then the courthouse — an ambition that first sprouted in high school. Finding his path When he was 12 years old, Hernandez came out as gay in his hometown of Mesa, Ariz. “Even then, I was outspoken,” he says. Within a few weeks, he noticed changes in the way he was treated. Ugly names, paper, gum, and pencils were thrown his way between classes, he wrote last year in an opinion piece published in The Tech, MIT’s student newspaper. Administrators at his middle school told Hernandez to cut his hair shorter, to change his behavior, to fit in better. Now Hernandez shrugs when asked about the backlash: “Yes, the bullying was awful, but I don’t regret coming out. Ultimately, coming out helped me then start to think about a lot of other issues.” As Hernandez navigated his way through middle and high school, he nurtured a love of history. Particularly fascinated by the American revolutionary era and U.S. law, Hernandez was also very strong in math. Once at MIT, however, it was history and law that continued to captivate him. Hernandez devoured constitutional law and political science classes with his now-thesis advisors Chris Capozzola, an associate professor of history, and Charles Stewart III, the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science. Hernandez says Capozzola — who has served as a mentor, friend, and adviser for his American studies major, thesis, and law school applications — has been the most influential person he has met since coming to MIT. An American history class with the late Pauline Maier, the William Kenan Jr. Professor of History, also greatly influenced Hernandez. “Professor Maier was amazing; I had never had a professor like her,” he says. “She was so well-versed in the field, she had written many books about what she was teaching, and she facilitated great discussion.” To Hernandez, history is more than just a tool to study his chosen profession. “It helps me understand the world better,” he says. Hernandez got the chance to apply what he learned in his classes during an internship with Sen. John Kerry’s office the summer after his sophomore year. “That helped me see the legislative side of things, and I definitely want that foundation to understand the intent as well as the letter of the law,” he says. “A lot of court decisions look at what exactly Congress was debating when they passed the law, like what they were actually trying to do with it.” Last year, Hernandez worked at the Volunteer Lawyers Project of the Boston Bar Association. “It gave me a really good chance to work not only in a legal setting directly, but specifically in pro bono work, which is something I definitely want to pursue as an attorney,” Hernandez says. Cory Hernandez Photo: Allegra Boverman A welcoming MIT While the courtroom may one day be Hernandez’s venue for work toward a fair society, for now he focuses on MIT, where he has spearheaded numerous campaigns, student groups, and events to create a more welcoming and vibrant community. His efforts have included the Living Pink survey, which was used to create a guide to residences at MIT for LGBTQ students, as well as a campaign that encouraged MIT faculty, staff, and students to post rainbow-themed “You Are Welcome Here” signs — now ubiquitous around the Institute — on their doors. “It really helps people feel like MIT is friendly and accepting toward them,” Hernandez says. Last year, Hernandez tackled diversity and mental health as well, helping to found a multicultural programming club and joining Active Minds, a student group focused on lifting the stigma surrounding mental health issues. Throughout his more than three years at the Institute, Hernandez feels that he’s been able to make a difference. “Sometimes people that I’ve never met come up to me and say, ‘I’ve been here for a while, and I know what things were like a few years ago.’ They say that with the work that I’ve done, they’ve really seen a big change in the climate of acceptance here,” Hernandez says. “It’s nice to hear, even those small things.” Hernandez’s MIT-oriented efforts also include leadership in the Undergraduate Association and the Association of Student Activities, where he serves as treasurer and an undergraduate member-at-large, respectively. “I started realizing you can actually change MIT and improve things for students, which is why I got more and more involved,” Hernandez says. “For instance, we have around 470 student groups, and it’s the student government’s job to provide resources for them, and we do it. Which I love, because MIT is really about enabling people and empowering them to do what they want to do.” (Comment on this)
8:00a	New role for ‘hunger hormone’ About a dozen years ago, scientists discovered that a hormone called ghrelin enhances appetite. Dubbed the “hunger hormone,” ghrelin was quickly targeted by drug companies seeking treatments for obesity — none of which have yet panned out. MIT neuroscientists have now discovered that ghrelin’s role goes far beyond controlling hunger. The researchers found that ghrelin released during chronic stress makes the brain more vulnerable to traumatic events, suggesting that it may predispose people to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Drugs that reduce ghrelin levels, originally developed to try to combat obesity, could help protect people who are at high risk for PTSD, such as soldiers serving in war, says Ki Goosens, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, and senior author of a paper describing the findings in the Oct. 15 online edition of Molecular Psychiatry. “Perhaps we could give people who are going to be deployed into an active combat zone a ghrelin vaccine before they go, so they will have a lower incidence of PTSD. That’s exciting because right now there’s nothing given to people to prevent PTSD,” says Goosens, who is also a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Lead author of the paper is Retsina Meyer, a recent MIT PhD recipient. Other authors are McGovern postdoc Anthony Burgos-Robles, graduate student Elizabeth Liu, and McGovern research scientist Susana Correia. Stress and fear Stress is a useful response to dangerous situations because it provokes action to escape or fight back. However, when stress is chronic, it can produce anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses. At MIT, Goosens discovered that one brain structure that is especially critical for generating fear, the amygdala, has a special response to chronic stress. The amygdala produces large amounts of growth hormone during stress, a change that seems not to occur in other brain regions. In the new paper, Goosens and her colleagues found that the release of the growth hormone in the amygdala is controlled by ghrelin, which is produced primarily in the stomach and travels throughout the body, including the brain. Ghrelin levels are elevated by chronic stress. In humans, this might be produced by factors such as unemployment, bullying, or loss of a family member. Ghrelin stimulates the secretion of growth hormone from the brain; the effects of growth hormone from the pituitary gland in organs such as the liver and bones have been extensively studied. However, the role of growth hormone in the brain, particularly the amygdala, is not well known. The researchers found that when rats were given either a drug to stimulate the ghrelin receptor or gene therapy to overexpress growth hormone over a prolonged period, they became much more susceptible to fear than normal rats. Fear was measured by training all of the rats to fear an innocuous, novel tone. While all rats learned to fear the tone, the rats with prolonged increased activity of the ghrelin receptor or overexpression of growth hormone were the most fearful, assessed by how long they froze after hearing the tone. Blocking the cell receptors that interact with ghrelin or growth hormone reduced fear to normal levels in chronically stressed rats. When rats were exposed to chronic stress over a prolonged period, their circulating ghrelin and amygdalar growth hormone levels also went up, and fearful memories were encoded more strongly. This is similar to what the researchers believe happens in people who suffer from PTSD. “When you have people with a history of stress who encounter a traumatic event, they are more likely to develop PTSD because that history of stress has altered something about their biology. They have an excessively strong memory of the traumatic event, and that is one of the things that drives their PTSD symptoms,” Goosens says. New drugs, new targets Over the last century, scientists have described the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which produces adrenaline, cortisol (corticosterone in rats), and other hormones that stimulate “fight or flight” behavior. Since then, stress research has focused almost exclusively on the HPA axis. After discovering ghrelin’s role in stress, the MIT researchers suspected that ghrelin was also linked to the HPA axis. However, they were surprised to find that when the rats’ adrenal glands — the source of corticosterone, adrenaline, and noradrenaline — were removed, the animals still became overly fearful when chronically stressed. The authors also showed that repeated ghrelin-receptor stimulation did not trigger release of HPA hormones, and that blockade of the ghrelin receptor did not blunt release of HPA stress hormones. Therefore, the ghrelin-initiated stress pathway appears to act independently of the HPA axis. “That’s important because it gives us a whole new target for stress therapies,” Goosens says. Pharmaceutical companies have developed at least a dozen possible drug compounds that interfere with ghrelin. Many of these drugs have been found safe for humans, but have not been shown to help people lose weight. The researchers believe these drugs could offer a way to vaccinate people entering stressful situations, or even to treat people who already suffer from PTSD, because ghrelin levels remain high long after the chronic stress ends. PTSD affects about 7.7 million American adults, including soldiers and victims of crimes, accidents, or natural disasters. About 40 to 50 percent of patients recover within five years, Meyer says, but the rest never get better. The researchers hypothesize that the persistent elevation of ghrelin following trauma exposure could be one of the factors that maintain PTSD. “So, could you immediately reverse PTSD? Maybe not, but maybe the ghrelin could get damped down and these people could go through cognitive behavioral therapy, and over time, maybe we can reverse it,” Meyer says. Working with researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, Goosens’ lab is now planning to study ghrelin levels in human patients suffering from anxiety and fear disorders. They are also planning a clinical trial of a drug that blocks ghrelin to see if it can prevent relapse of depression. The research was funded by the U.S. Army Research Office, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Institute of Mental Health. (Comment on this)

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