Author: jlolds

Native Angeleno, professor of Neuroscience and Public Policy at George Mason University

High performing scientific organizations: the role of foment

One of the characteristics of excellence for a scientific organization is a steady increase over the years in the typical metrics for success (e.g. publications in high impact journals, sponsored research). Another as important characteristic is that excellent scientific organizations build and retain a culture of intense scientific interaction among and between P.I.’s, their trainees and students that at one level manifests as a collegial environment, but more importantly as a place of intense scientific foment. Scientific foment of the type, I’m describing, is to discovery as yeast is to sourdough bread.
So, how to create and sustain that scientific foment?
By experience, it’s become clear to me that first and foremost, there’s the necessary but not sufficient condition: a light-touch management style. Foment is a bottom-up process, and no amount of strategic planning can force it to happen. Deeply entrenched in the scientific DNA is a tendency to question authority along with a healthy skepticism of pronouncements from on high. Hence, simply telling investigators to go forth and foment hasn’t worked (to my knowledge) and is unlikely to be a successful approach.
Secondly, foment doesn’t arise in an environment that is overly burdened with bureaucratic concerns. Take the environment of a driver’s license exam office and you’ll likely not find the seeds of the next advance in cell biology. So an approach by management to actively decrease what is now arcanely termed “paperwork”, is likely to begin to set the initial conditions for success.
Thirdly, there must be a meritocratic culture. Rewards (of all kinds) ought to be meted out by management both for scientific success, but also for the taking of scientific risk–because the greatest scientific successes, always entail some significant amount of scientific risk. In other words, we are against rewarding the minimal publishable unit ramped-up, rather we reward distinct, identifiable discovery that’s made on the basis of experimental (in vivo, in vitro or in silico) research success.
Fourthly, scientific jargon, should be frowned upon–in general. I have lately become of the opinion that such jargon operates in some ways as the secret rituals of fraternities, to exclude those who haven’t been initiated. There are great opportunities for foment at the fracture zones between disciplines, where the important questions often haven’t been posed, much less tested experimentally. To have foment across the disciplinary fracture zones implies checking one’s jargon “heat” at the door.
Finally, none of this can happen if management lacks scientific credibility. Management, need not conduct the experiments, but management certainly needs to be part of the foment, at every step of the way. For an institute like ours, one with frontiers of exploration in domains ranging from molecular to human social behavior, there then must be a scholarly curiosity about many fields (not just one) from the leadership.

Stanislas Dehaene’s new book on Reading

In today’s NY Times Book Review, Alllison Gopnik review’s a new book on reading by Stanislas Dehaene here.

It really comes down in the end to Noam Chomsky’s linguistical theories as they are played out on the modern neuroscience stage.
Money quote:

However, the other, more significant, kind of innateness concerns not the history of the mind but its future. Chomsky also argued that innate structure places very strong constraints on the human mind. Evolutionary psychologists who echo Chomsky say we are stuck with the same brains as our hunter-gatherer ancestors, with just a little tinkering around the edges.

Many social scientists reject this second claim. A new generation of cognitive scientists and neuroscientists are starting to reject it, too. In the past few years, computer scientists have developed new machine learning techniques that allow computers to make genuinely new discoveries, and cognitive scientists have begun to discover that even young children’s minds learn in much the same way. At the same time, neuroscientists have discovered that the brain is much more plastic — more influenced by experience — than we used to think.

Math, Physics and Chemistry: my opinion

I get asked a lot about the types of courses one should take during the undergraduate years in order to become successful as a professional neuroscientist. This is an interesting question because very often the inquiring student mentions such alternatives as biology or psychology as being reasonable approaches. I disagree. From my standpoint, based on both growing up with two neuroscientists as parents, and my own career in academia, the key proficiencies need to be in the afore mentioned fields: mathematics, physics and chemistry. Master a base of knowledge from these fields, and you’ll be well positioned to pick up the rest (psychology, biology etc.). I’m not sure the reverse is true. The important point is that the knowledge embedded in math, physics and chemistry is absolutely essential to the ability to fully understand much of the keystone work coming out in neuroscience today. That doesn’t mean one can’t glean the basic ideas and current theories without (in contrast to say quantum mechanics), but to understand in depth, these quantitative and foundational knowledge areas are required.

I was a chemistry major at Amherst College, quite against my own plans–the sheer force of will on the part of my parents pushed me at chemistry. But it was a wonderful thing that they did for me in terms of opening doors into hard science.

A new decade and the fifth year of this blog

First, a happy Twenty Ten to all of the loyal readers of this blog, now in it’s fifth year. My hope for all of us is that this new decade brings forth some really excellent science–science that perhaps can be usefully applied to our planet’s many vexing problems.

A New Year’s thought: I’m often struck by how often the pundits assume either constancy or linearity to trends, neither of which is really captures the richness of the complex adaptive system within which we all live out our lives (Even Moore’s Law may be a casualty of either the current physical limitations of integrated circuit construction or perhaps quantum computing). Of course, a Kurzweilian Singularity could easily be bad for us, just as well as good. So there we have it. But, as Andrew Sullivan often says “know hope”.

I also bring to your attention, a very interesting piece in the latest New Yorker by Tad Friend on the on-going crisis of funding public research universities as exemplified of course, by Berkeley. It’s behind the firewall, but an abstract can be found here. The point is that state funding for many publics is in the tank and the result is an attempt to retain academic excellence through other means–at Berkeley by raising student fees. The money quote from the piece is:

Dr. Harry Powell, the U.C. faculty’s chief liaison to the Regents, said, “The legislators have told us, essentially, ‘The Student is your A.T.M. They’re how you should balance your budget.’ “

Fall semester draws to a close

My university made the news today with the announcement of the gift of a large and strategically located piece of land out near Dulles International Airport–we do keep growing here at Mason, in spite of these interesting times.

I’m ready to turn in grades, finish up the business of the various committees that I chair and then early next week head for the holiday break, which we’ll be taking up in the Virginia Blue Ridge at our Wintergreen House.
On behalf of all of us at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, here’s wish you and yours a very happy holiday and a great 2010.
Jim

The Economist weighs in on state finances

One of my favorite newspapers (their term–it sure looks like a magazine) views the current fiscal disasters of the U.S. states (e.g. California) through the Keynesian lens here. Basically being forced constitutionally to balance their budgets, the states are being forced to raise taxes and cut spending–exactly the opposite of what John Maynard Keynes would have recommended under the current circumstances.

The American Dream

David Brooks and Gail Collins on the future of the American Dream. I find myself agreeing with both of them. But without an economy that heavily leverages advances in science and technology, it’ll be very difficult for me to be at all optimistic about the future. So we not only need a creative class (think Richard Florida), we also need that creative class to be producing real products that offer solutions to our huge problems (think the intersection of climate and energy or health care).

Open letter to Congress from US Scientists

Can be found here.

Money quote:

These “multiple independent lines of evidence” are drawn from numerous public and private

research centers all across the United States and beyond, including several independent

analyses of surface temperature data. Even without including analyses from the UK research

center from which the emails were stolen, the body of evidence underlying our understanding

of human-caused global warming remains robust.