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UC Berkeley: Research Abroad
Five faculty members at UC Berkeley conduct research abroad with a humanitarian emphasis.Sunday, October 19, 2008
UC Berkeley anatomy professor and neuroscientist Marian Diamond was delighted to learn last Wednesday that two of her students were heading to college-not her UC Berkeley students, but the orphaned children she taught in a poverty-stricken monastery in the forests of Cambodia.
Every winter for the past seven years, Diamond has traveled to the Siem Reap province to work with impoverished children at the Wat Racha Sin Khon monastery as part of a neural development research program called Enrichment in Action.
The orphanage is run by Buddhist monks who took in children after they lost their parents during the Khmer Rouge regime. When Diamond first visited, about 15 children aged 10 to 19 lived in the orphanage.
The orphanage has no running water,
electricity or bathrooms. Conditions were very primitive, Diamond said, and the houses only consisted of poles, a floor and a roof.
After witnessing the orphans' poverty and lack of formal education -one was 19 and still in the second grade-Diamond said she felt the children could greatly gain from her help. She teaches English and computer skills to the children in the orphanage.
"I just wanted to see if we could change their environments for the better," she said.
Diamond said the program is also a way to apply the knowledge gained in a lab to benefit humans. Before working in Cambodia, she spent 35 years at UC Berkeley studying the effects of enriched and impoverished environments on rats.
During her research, she found that a more stimulating environment enlarged the rats' brains.
"When we put our rats in enriched environments, we increase the dimensions of the outer layers of the brain, the cerebral cortex. When we put them in impoverished environments, the cortex shrinks," she said.
However, the goal of her lab work was not just to enrich the environments of rats, but to enrich humanity.
"It's wonderful to know that we can enrich rats, but to translate it so humans can benefit from it � it's the beauty of transferring it so everybody benefits," Diamond said.