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Funding for Research on Psychedelics Is on the Rise, Along with Scientists' Hopes for Using Them
As interest and support for psychedelic research grows, scientists share their hopes for the future.
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November 10, 2023
Funding for Research on Psychedelics Is on the Rise, Along with Scientists' Hopes for Using Them
As interest and support for psychedelic research grows, scientists share their hopes for the future.
By Rachel Nuwer edited by Tulika Bose & Alexa Lim
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Molly Ferguson/Scientific American
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This is Episode Three of a three-part Fascination on the science of psychedelics. You can listen to Episode One here and Episode Two here.
Gül Dölen: I remember when I first applied to the NIH, my program officer was like, “No, nobody will ever give psychedelics as a therapy. You’re barking up the wrong tree. You should be studying why these things are bad for the brain.”
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Nuwer: This was back in 2014, when Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Gül Dölen was trying to get funding to study whether psychedelic drugs might be master keys for reopening critical periods in the brain.
Dölen: I was like, “No, I think this is a great idea, and if we’re right about it, we’re going to win the Nobel Prize. I want to get credit for having this idea right now and will not change my grant to accommodate your view.” And so I was very stubborn, and I didn’t get the grant, and I didn’t get many, many, many other ones after that.
Nuwer: For Science, Quickly, I’m science journalist and author Rachel Nuwer. You’re listening to part three of a three-part series on the science of psychedelics.
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If Gül was submitting the same grant application today, she’d probably have a much stronger shot at getting it.
Dölen: There’s definitely been a sea change in terms of the attitudes toward funding psychedelics.
Nuwer: As funding opportunities for psychedelic science increase, researchers are beginning to put serious thought into mind-bending studies that previously would have seemed like fantasy.
Gül, for example, is currently seeking funding for a study she’s designed to see if psychedelics could be used to reopen a motor-learning critical period that would allow stroke patients to regain lost function.
Dölen: If it ends up being the case that psychedelics are able to do this, then it offers therapy for roughly 500,000 [or] 400,000 people a year in the United States alone who have a stroke but then don’t recover full function.
Nuwer: I was curious about what other researchers are most excited about in the field, so I reached out to several other leading thinkers to see what kind of psychedelic investigations they’re envisioning for the future.
Albert Garcia-Romeu is a research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He works mainly on using psychedelics in a clinical setting. Until now, studies of psychedelic-assisted therapy had mostly focused on post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, addiction and end-of-life anxiety, but there could be all sorts of other applications.
Albert Garcia-Romeu: Now you’re starting to see this multiply out into lots of different clinical areas, including things like anorexia nervosa. I’m doing a study [of] early-stage Alzheimer’s disease.
I have a study under development for people with long COVID. There’s lots of different directions to take the work, which is pretty neat, being a scientist, because it kind of makes you feel like you’re a kid in a candy shop.
Nuwer: Albert is also interested in studying how psychedelics might affect well people—that is, people who don’t have any particular disease but who just want to use the substances for things such as inner exploration, spirituality, personal enhancement, connection or just having fun.
Garcia-Romeu: It’s something that’s been around as long as written history, and so it really makes us think, “How can these substances be used outside of the medical framework?”
Nuwer: Albert imagines a study, for example, in which psychedelics are given to people to see if the drugs could help enhance creativity. Surprisingly, there is a precedent for this. Back in the 1960s, researchers at Stanford University actually gave healthy people LSD and mescaline to test this question.
Garcia-Romeu: They were taking all these kind of educated professionals and having them come in and [saying], “Think about one of the challenging problems that you’re facing in your work now.
Now we’re going to go ahead and give you one of these drugs and see if that can help you to have some further insight or come up with some potential solutions for that.”
It definitely yielded some really interesting and fruitful results where people did come out of that with things like patents and designs for new types of devices and, and buildings. And so ... that’s something that I think is incredibly interesting, especially being at, you know, a place like Hopkins.
You can talk to physicists, astrophysicists, people who are doing all sorts of different work on cancer biology and really see, like, wow, there’s a possibility here that we could take some of these people and put them through a protocol that would help them to think about the problems that they’re working on from a different perspective. And that, in turn, may yield some really, really fascinating and innovative new ways of dealing with problems that we’re now facing.
We’re in an era right now of all of these different types of crises.
And so in the midst of all this, how can we also position psychedelics as allies or as tools that we can use to hopefully better navigate this rapidly changing and pretty chaotic era that we find ourselves in?
Nuwer: Psychedelics might also be used to help us get through difficult times by allowing researchers to dissect and better understand another very important component of the human experience: happiness.
Sonja Lyubomirsky: My name is Sonja Lyubomirsky, and I’m a professor of psychology at the University of California of Riverside. I’ve been studying happiness for almost 35 years.
My lab does what we call happiness intervention.
And we do randomized controlled trials. They’re kind of like clinical trials, but instead of testing a new vaccine, we’re testing, like, a happiness strategy, like gratitude or kindness.
Nuwer: After years of research, Sonja realized that strategies for making people feel happier tend to boil down to one key thing: making them feel more connected to other people.
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