Have you tried learning Japanese / English after learning the other? I studied Japanese and learned how to pronounce the /r/ in Japanese correctly.
For some people, the difficulty is less in production, and more in interpretation for someone who is native Japanese speaking and later learned English.
Chiming in with more context, my PhD was in neuroscience and I worked in a language lab. As others have stated, there is a critical window for learning a language. The biology behind it is fascinating.
As early as about 9 months of age, your brain begins to decide what speech sounds are important to you. For example, in Japanese the difference between /r/ and /l/ sounds doesn't matter, but in English it does. Before 9 months, most babies can tell the difference between the two sounds, but babies living in Japanese-speaking environments (without any English) LOSE this ability after 9ish months!
Language is more than just speech sounds, though. Imagine all these nuances of language - there are critical moments where your brain just decides to accept or reject them, and it's coded somewhere in your DNA.
It proved there were benefits, read the article.
Very few things are proved definitively in science. You test a hypothesis with statistics, which always carries a margin of error. Usually, it's 5% - the probability that your data randomly supports your hypothesis, even though there's no true relationship.
Personally, I prefer when journalists coach their language to avoid overstating the truth.
Great, now I have to start proof-reading any communications I get from the FDA to make sure it didn't hallucinate a scientific article in the citations. There's going to be so many Vegetative Microscopy proposals.
Good point, I'm assuming all monitors are as good as mine.
Fair point, but a lot of the article talks about how many studies aren't meeting all four pillars of clinical trial design - that's where my issue comes in, I think reporting that X% of trials do not meet all pillars is a bad metric.
And, not all medications these days are pills or IV infusions - some medications and treatments, which are governed by the FDA, are more invasive and more complicated.
The consent process for clinical trials has a ton of guidance (ICH GCP), but the onus is on the clinical monitors and hospitals to make sure it's done correctly. Many trials now generate supporting documentation in which hospital staff are required to describe the circumstances in which consent was acquired. If the documents are generated, then it's auditable.
Things get a bit hairy when you look at trials in Alzheimer's and other cognitive disorders, because the patient may not be coherent enough to withdraw from the trial. In those cases, a legal guardian is responsible for the decision.
Unfortunately, this was an issue before Trump and will continue to be one afterwards. Assuming there even is an afterwards...
The article brings up some great points, some of which that I, an industry insider, weren't even aware of, especially the historical context surrounding the AIDS epidemic. I'll jump into the thread to critique an issue within the article.
One of the four pillars recommended by the FDA (control groups) are great in theory but can lead to very real problems in practice, specifically within indications that have an unmet treatment need or are exceptionally rare conditions.
If you have a disease that is 99% fatal but has 0 standard of care treatment options, is it ethical to ask a participant to enroll in a clinical trial and potentially not receive the study treatment/be on placebo? Or, what if the trial involves an incredibly invasive procedure like brain surgery - is it ethical for people to do a placebo procedure? Food for thought - and an explanation for why so few trials meet all four criteria proposed by the FDA.
Happy to answer questions about the industry if anyone has them.
Pharmaceuticals in the US. Fairly early in my career, get paid just short of $100k/year. All it took was getting a doctorate and selling a little bit of my soul.
Sometimes I miss academic research. But at the end of the day I'm getting paid about 4x as much while working 1/2 the hours, by my estimate I'm 8x as happy now. Plus, there's something to be said for working on projects that actually affect people's lives instead of overstating the impacts of my research to compete for a dwindling pool of federal grants. Seeing the policy changes in the US this year, I'm very glad I left academia but I'm not convinced I'm 100% safe from changes made at the FDA.
I studied parts of the basal ganglia, part of the dopaminergic circuits of motor control. I'm not sure if it's a poorly written (news) article or the scientist was overstating his position - I don't know any neuroscientists who think dopamine is "sprayed" across the brain.
Edit: The paper is a breakthrough because it's reporting the first-ever direct imaging of dopamine signaling. But the news article mischaracterizes it.