Writing this, the first wave of COVID-19 is receding, leaving behind over 100,000 dead, tens of millions unemployed, and an unknown level of damage to both national and global economies. Furthermore, the nation has been contorted by a spasm of outrage unseen since the 1960s, sparked by the graphic murder of a black man on a widely shared video. It is not an understatement to claim that we live in uncertain times.
As a partial response to the demands that COVID-19 has placed on all of us, this issue of Yale Medicine Magazine is being published online.
The current issue—planned long before COVID-19 struck—focuses on developments in Yale’s neuroscience programs. Progress in neuroscience and neurology has been slow owing to a number of technological and ethical hurdles including absolute prohibitions against performing certain experiments involving the brain, difficulty measuring molecular activity, and the blood-brain barrier. Over the last few years, that has begun to change.
To capture this progress, our theme is “the body and the mind.” This gets at the long-held and deeply felt popular misconception that “the mind” is something other than a physiological organ, an entity separate from the body. One of the longest-held promises of science has been to fully explain the brain’s functions—and science is, having developed the proper tools, finally beginning to deliver.
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