Opinion – Marcelo Leite: For neuroscientists, reconstruction depends on believing in science again

This column was produced especially for the campaign #science in the elections, at the request of Instituto Serrapilheira and Maranta Inteligencia Politica.

This July, columnists give space to topics related to the scientific process, in texts written by guests or by the columnists themselves that reflect on this question: how science can participate in the reconstruction of Brazil.

I posed this question to Dráulio de Araújo, from the Brain Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (ICe/UFRN). He is one of those responsible for elevating Brazilian psychedelic science to an international level in its renaissance, and that’s what we talked about.

The dialogue began with the power of scientific research and its weaknesses. Both reflections are crucial to make people believe in science again, in his opinion the most urgent task in Brazil.

The greatest power of science comes from its ability to predict. “Science does not just say that the stone will fall, but tries and manages to predict, at every moment, where the stone will be”, he exemplifies.

It was on the basis of this ability that humanity arrived in space. “We didn’t send five people to the Moon and three arrived. We sent three and the three arrived and came back.”

The branch is that many people prefer to pay more attention to the weaknesses of science. In the face of very complex systems, the power of anticipation is limited, as in the case of the atmosphere and meteorology.

The weather forecast is not always right, and some people get annoyed with it. But no pilot, farmer or event promoter will fail to draw on this knowledge, however imprecise.

Something similar happens with biomedicine, the research focused on human health. Organisms and behaviors are complex by nature, even more so when they interact with other beings of the complexity of viruses and bacteria.

No one questions whether the stone will fall when it is dropped into the air, but many feel they have the right to doubt vaccines. They don’t always work, true, or not for everyone. In very rare cases, they can cause adverse effects, such as allergic reactions.

It’s the best there is, though. Even in the face of the challenge posed by a threatening pathogen like the new coronavirus (Sars-CoV-2), researchers managed to create and test reasonably effective immunizations in record time, which brought us back to social life and a return to some kind of normality.

Just as the pilot does not give up the weather charts, it would be irresponsible for governments and public health authorities to neglect vaccines like these. Exploiting its weaknesses for political ends, as President Jair Bolsonaro and several ministers and followers did, is an act against humanity.

Here is a very Brazilian disease that neuroscience — including the national one — can help to treat: the epidemic of inhumanity that is ravaging the country. This is where psychedelic substances come in, which research has been resurrecting as treatments (still experimental) for serious psychological disorders such as depression.

Powerful substances like MDMA, DMT and LSD have been banned for decades. Scientists like Araújo are managing to rescue them and give hope of treatment to a third of patients who do not benefit from the antidepressants available.

An example of the excellence achieved in Brazil by this line of research appeared on June 19 in an electronic version in the journal Experimental Neurology. Araújo is among several authors from Brazilian public universities (UFRN, UFRJ, Unicamp), alongside others from Spain and the United Kingdom.

The work brings together data from experiments with rodents, humans, brain organoids and modeling of neural networks to indicate that LSD induces neuroplasticity (new connections between neurons) and that it may be the cause of improvements in cognition.

Another known effect of psychedelics is increased empathy between humans and their connection to nature, as witnessed by legions of hippies in the past and ayahuasca adepts in the present.

“It is not nature and the human being, but rather: The human being is nature.”