Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 40 |
Number of pages | 1 |
Journal | Physiologist |
Volume | 63 |
Issue number | 1 |
State | Published - Jan 2020 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Physiology
- Physiology (medical)
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In: Physiologist, Vol. 63, No. 1, 01.2020, p. 40.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Comment/debate › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Why marathons are getting faster
AU - Joyner, Michael J.
N1 - Funding Information: While the general benefits of exercise are widely known among physiologists, many questions remain as to how exercise affects people at an individual level. “With exercise, there’s a lot of interesting biology going on under the hood,” Scott Trappe says. “When you start to peel back the layers, we don’t know the molecules underneath.” Both Trappes and Bodine are participating in the Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium (MoTrPAC), a national research consortium “designed to discover and perform preliminary characterization of the range of molecular transducers (the molecular map) that underlie the effects of physical activity in humans.” The six-year effort, supported by the National Institutes of Health Common Fund, has nearly completed its planned animal studies, and clinical sites are now recruiting for the adult study. With 2,000 participants being recruited, MoTrPAC is one of the largest human exercise studies and will expand what we know about how exercise impacts the body, Bodine says. “The initial goal is discovery. It’s a big data project looking at what molecular pathways are activated in response to exercise,” she says. “People respond differently to exercise. One end goal is to be able to prescribe exercise and to have a scientific basis for it.” Scott Trappe says the MoTrPAC project marks a new era in exercise research. “We don’t yet have a handle on heterogeneity in exercise,” he says. “There’s an argument in the lay media that some people don’t respond to exercise. MoTrPAC will allow us to look at genetic variations in a larger population.” Todd Trappe says the inclusion of “omics” experts in the study will make MoTrPAC different. “We are expecting to collect petabytes of data on the participants, and the expertise across the consortium will be necessary to stitch this magnitude of information together into a meaningful story,” he says. But while understanding the molecular map of how exercise affects the body may yield critical data to inform exercise recommendations for individuals, it may not tell researchers something critical: how to get people to stick to an exercise program. “It could be partially genetic,” Bodine says of why people don’t exercise. “But we also need to be thinking about exercise when designing communities. Our daily amount of activity has been decreasing because of technology.” Still, even those who are well aware of exercise’s benefits may have trouble getting to the gym. “That’s when you call a psychologist, not a physiologist,” Todd Trappe says. Funding Information: “Nowadays, data is everything”—the key to grants, publications and, in some cases, patents. That’s in part because the competition is so stiff today, he says. Over the past decade or longer, the annual budgets of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have failed to keep pace with the rate of inflation, meaning that both agencies have lost purchasing power. At the same time, the size of the scientific workforce has grown faster than federal research budgets, with the end result being more competition for grants. The chance of getting a research project grant funded by the NIH fell from 32 percent in fiscal year (FY) 2000 to 20 percent in FY 2018, meaning that only 1 out of every 5 grant applications submitted receives funding. “One of my mentors used to say that when people are hungry, they lose their manners around the dinner table,” says Stella Goulopoulou, PhD, assistant professor of physiology and anatomy at the University of North Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. “Right now, science is underfunded. People may be close to losing their manners.” Meanwhile, with the increased sharing of data, universities and researchers are more protective of their intellectual property (IP), says Hester, who chairs the IP committee at the University of Mississippi. In the 1990s, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office created the provisional patent to protect IP as researchers develop their findings. Once you file a provisional patent, the clock starts ticking. You have one year to file the full patent. Funding Information: IIf you work in a lab that depends on federal research grants, Congress needs to hear from you about why it is important to support the budgets of agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Funding Information: Comparative & Evolutionary Physiology Section Travel Award sponsored by Novo Nordisk Foundation (Deadline: January 2, 2020)
PY - 2020/1
Y1 - 2020/1
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85079900297&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85079900297&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Comment/debate
AN - SCOPUS:85079900297
SN - 0031-9376
VL - 63
SP - 40
JO - Physiologist
JF - Physiologist
IS - 1
ER -