In 2019 Marie-Germaine Bousser, Hugues Chabriat, Anne Joutel and Elisabeth Tournier-Lasserve won the world’s most valuable prize for brain research, The Lundbeck Foundation Brain Prize, for their outstanding work on CADASIL. They spent more than 30 years describing, understanding and diagnosing CADASIL, which is the most common hereditary form of stroke. In this film Marie-Germaine Bousser tells the story of the remarkable discovery of CADASIL.
In this video, Ray Dolan talks about their research, which has helped improve our understanding of the role played by dopamine in the brain’s reward system. Among other things, they given us an insight into how this neurotransmitter helps us learn and strive for more – but how it can also lead us astray.
In this video, Stanislas Dehaene talks about their research and how it has provided new knowledge about the learning processes behind reading and mathematics and about social behaviours and behavioural disorders. They worked together to create better examination methods and therapies vital for people suffering from severe mental disorders, substance abuse and learning difficulties.
With just a single flash of light you can turn brain cells on and off. The technology is called optogenetics and, in short, aims at genetically modifying selected brain cells to make them sensitive to light so that they can subsequently be activated or deactivated by illuminating them. It can give us a better insight into how the brain basically works and what role the various cells play when the brain gets sick. The inventors of the technology won the world’s largest brain research award, The Brain Prize in 2013. In this video one of the winners, Ed Boyden, explains the award winning technology.
Today, we understand deafness at a molecular level. This is, in particular, thanks to two outstanding scientists, Christine Petit and Karen Steel, who received the world’s most prestigious brain research prize, The Brain Prize, in 2012. In this video, Christine Petit talks about their ground-breaking genetic research, which has helped unravel some of the mystery of deafness and hearing impairment.
Their results and ideas help elucidate the causes and symptoms of a range of brain disorders such as epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, anxiety and dementia. Due to their research into some of the most basic processes in the brain, we have new knowledge about how we remember, how we store personal experiences and how we know where we are.