Almost a year after the "Decade of the Brain," neuroscience remains one of the fastest growing disciplines in all biology, researchwise and jobwise. The health of this job market relates to the overall expansion that continues in the neurosciences, says Richard Nakamura, acting deputy director at the National Institute of Mental Health. He notes that some especially promising areas include human genomes and genomics, and particularly, understanding the behavioral consequences and epidemiology of mental illness.
"For mental health, we are going after diseases with a high inherited component such as schizophrenia or autism," Nakamura reports. "These are all not Mendelian inherited, so finding out how genes interact to produce these diseases is a really critical issue and will require a lot of resources." Other disease targets include depression; bipolar diseases, such as manic depression; Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and other dementia disorders; anxiety disorders; and loss of cognition disorders....
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