Author: Cindy Nghe

By Dr. Greg Dussor and Dr. Ted Price

Being a tenure track faculty member is becoming more and more synonymous with becoming an entrepreneur and the CEO of a small business (your research lab). As such, you become solely responsible for raising funds for the operation of your new small business. However, unlike other entrepreneurial minded citizens that are able to solely focus on running their business, you are expected to perform a variety of other duties, such as, teaching, mentoring, creating social media content (case in point), spinning discoveries into marketable products, serving on university committees, serving as a reviewer for journals and serving on study section. So much serving! By the time you complete your auxiliary duties, you may be asking yourself, what time is left to run my lab and how will I raise money? According to a 2016 Nature survey, finding funding was cited as the biggest challenge for new scientists.

We have written the below five tips that we believe have aided us in crafting better grants and we hope that you find them helpful.

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Dr. Greg Dussor and Dr. Ted Price have collaborated for the past 20 years. They have submitted countless grants and, in addition to private foundation grants, they are currently funded by five R01’s. Dr. Price teaches a grant writing course at UT Dallas and both Drs. Dussor and Price serve on NIH scientific review groups.

By Eric David, PhD Student

For as long as I can remember, the Texas summer heat indicated the onset of two-a-day’s and the beginning of football season. Practice would begin early, but the morning breeze would quickly end as the August sun rose, and the suffocating heat would expose a divide between those that had prepared for the year and those that ended up in a corner paying for their summer sins in vomit.

Our coaches would blast music over our heads from speakers just a few dozen yards away. This served to deaden our senses, muting the part of our brain telling us to stop. As the days progressed, we transitioned into “full pad” which would only further delineate the weak and the strong. Some days you were the hammer and some days the nail, and when tensions inevitable rose, having eyes in the back of your head was useful. The violence was subtly encouraged and having the ability to push 300lb men into the ground through sheer will and strength was a testament to our training. These were the summers I knew.

Despite never missing a game, in the summer of 2018 I found myself in Lenox Hill hospital in New York City with sepsis and had part of my finger removed due to cellulitis. I was hospitalized and received I.V. antibiotics for an osteomyelitis infection of the hand for over 12 weeks. This happened as I had come off an all-conference season in my third year and was selected as a pre-season all-American. However, I wasn’t allowed to compete until the season was underway, and it seemed all for naught, as we had the worst season in over nine years. Athletes everywhere always face the risk of injury and this is particularly true for football. Furthermore, injury alone isn’t the biggest threat. It is the long-lasting affect, both physically and mentally, of injuries that are most troublesome. In fact, a 2017 study found that D1 athletes participating in a collision sport experienced a lower health related quality of life in their later years than non-injured athletes and non-athletes.[1]

Many of my friends now live with sciatica conditions, improper knee surgeries, brain trauma, and worn down joints. Many of these athletes (including myself) had been playing football since elementary school and have experienced an untold damage that we are only just now understanding. In a 2007 survey of retired NFL athletes, researchers found that nearly half of all respondents (n=1617) reported that difficulty with pain was “very common” or “quite common”.[2] Alarmingly, many of these people also suffered from depressive symptoms and the prevailing theory seems to indicate that depression typically follows from the severity of pain that people experience.

From a player’s perspective we know that each athlete on the field is unique to their assignment and coaches design game strategies on a “mismatch” between two athletes. Differences in height and weight are noted and Newton’s second law of physics cannot be disproven, as the person with the most force produced will win. This results in thousands of chances to be injured and the continual hitting that occurs creates thousands of asymptomatic micro concussions. Over four years of D1 football, I witnessed players have behavioral changes such as irrational anger and deteriorating decision-making that are now part of the known symptoms of suffering from micro concussions, except it’s happening decades before it should. These conditions led players into quitting and are no longer continuing a career in sports. In one case, an offensive lineman that had a promising future at the next level was forced to retire from athletics after suffering a bulging disk in his lower spinal column. Sadly, they would not be the only example.

This is an issue not confined to the program I was in, or the sport, but a systemic problem for athletics as a whole. Student-athletes spend hours perfecting a craft, and in doing so wear their joints down, or suffer severe accidents that leave them needing years of physical therapy. A culture of aggression and persecution are simultaneously reinforced, leading to extreme behaviors that leak into our daily life. A 2015 study noted “that the regular hits taken by offensive linemen are leading to more-frequent postimpact symptoms than other positions, but are more frequently left unreported, possibly due to their routine nature”.[3] Often, the “manliness” of football is so ingrained that players were encouraged to play through hits that caused dizziness and other symptomatic conditions of concussion.

Due to these experiences and my familiarity with injury and pain, I have transitioned to a PhD program to pursue my interest in chronic pain research. I now more fully understand how our bodies can deteriorate over time, leading to the release of molecules that cause the chronic pain that we can see in some athletes. My goal is to study the hormonal influences on the pain regulation pathway in the nervous system and contribute to the understanding of how this occurs and how we can help athletes that live with chronic pain, just as my friends and I do today.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4852526/#i1062-6050-51-3-205-b45

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17414796

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4628259

By Candler Paige, PhD student, NIH Blueprint D-Span Awardee

We’re all familiar with the excruciating pain we experience after we hit our elbow on a door frame, and often wish that those annoying experiences never happened, but when discovering new pain drugs one of the biggest concerns facing scientists is making sure that the new medicines can relieve chronic, unnecessary pain without inhibiting acute pain. The acute pain tells us to wake up and alerts us to the hazards of walking sleepily around the Lego battle field that is your living room floor. Although extremely annoying, the short-lived pains we feel every day are protective – these experiences keep us from irreversibly injuring ourselves. There are some people that don’t have this “spidey” sense. People with congenital insensitivity to pain have a genetic mutation that prevents them from feeling any pain at all which causes them to accumulate wounds, burns, broken bones, and they generally have significantly shorter lifespans than those of us that do feel pain. In general, pain protects us from injuring ourselves.

There is one aspect of all types of pain that has eluded scientists: in addition to general discomfort of the pain, people also tend to have an increased sensitivity to their surroundings. Lights are too bright, noises are too loud and this increased sensitivity makes the pain worse. This seems counter-intuitive. Why would your body make painful experiences more wretched than they already are? Scientists have understood the advantage of acute pain for centuries, but the point of the miserable experiences surrounding pain was still not completely understood. For humans to have kept this feature over millions of years of evolution meant that there was some sort of advantage that kept us alive. In 2014 the Walters Lab at The University of Texas Health Science Center decided to explore this problem in squid – an animal often used in exploring evolutionary neuroscience.

In a set of experiments led by Dr. Robyn Crook, it was discovered that pain prevents injured squid from being captured and eaten by their predators. To come to this conclusion uninjured squid were placed in a tank with injured squid along with sea bass – a natural predator. The injured squid had a small cut made on one of their fins without anesthesia. The group observed that the bass were more likely to try to attack the injured squid compared to healthy groups. Then, the injured squid were placed in a tank alone with the sea bass. 50% of the attacks by the bass were successful in capturing the injured squid (when compared to only 25% of the healthy squid being captured). Next, the experimenters anesthetized the squid before the injury – so that they felt no pain after they were injured. Surprisingly, 75% of the squid that were injured but felt no pain were captured and eaten by the bass.

What the group found was the benefit of acute pain immediately following an injury: a defensive response. They showed that pain in injured squid seemed to heighten their defense system – this (somewhat) made up for the injury they had on their fins. The authors summarized their findings:

“Thus, while minor injury increases the risk of predatory attack, it also triggers a sensitized state that promotes enhanced responsiveness to threats, increasing the survival (Darwinian fitness) of injured animals during subsequent predatory encounters.” (Crook et al. 2014)

What these findings demonstrate is the benefit of having increased sensitivity to one’s surroundings while in pain: animals are less likely to be eaten by a predator. This evolutionary advantage was maintained in humans to keep them from being eaten by lions or trampled by buffalo while hunting or stepping on Lego’s night after night.

The next time you have a headache and the noises outside your window are making you feel even worse – just remember your chances of getting eaten by a bear are even lower than they were before.

Want to learn more? Check out Dr. Price’s lecture on the Evolutionary Advantage of Nociceptor Sensitization.

Sources:
https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/congenital-insensitivity-to-pain#genes
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(14)00335-2