The beginning of my diary as a scientist

I have decided to change the blog content- i want to use it more like a 'diary' of my scientific life. hopefully i can help make people understand how scientists do their job, and our daily struggles at work and with science. I have also made my identity known. I am the head of biology at a non for profit foundation (www.chdifoundation.org) trying to develop medicines for HD. I oversee work carried out around the world by many teams of dedicated people, whom we contract work to develop medicines and find out how HD develops and progresses. We fund work in basic and applied research, and I work with a very talented set of chemists, biologists, pharmacologists and clinicians. I also work with project managers, business and legal people who help make our foundation a reality. We all work together to develop treatments for HD. I want to show you how I think about this problem, and the issues that I, like most scientists, have to solve to translate ideas to medicines. It is a long process, sometimes tiring and frustrating, because we don't know enough. But we try, as hard as we can, to develop rational approaches based on our current understanding of the brain and of the human body. We could not do this alone, science is built out of a history of studies and on the shoulders of many generations of people who have dedicated their lives to understanding how the brain works and what happens when things fail to work properly. Science is never a lonely enterprise, even if our daily work sometimes is. We are preceded by a history of knowledge. We generate a legacy to our successors, who will inevitably take our learnings and apply them to advance our understanding of any given process. In spite of how small our contributions might be, they will always help future generations. A small finding might be a clue in the future about something truly meaningful.