Author: jlolds

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

Thanks for the seven days!

I’ve taken the liberty of a week’s break and am ready to get back to blogging again. The high point of the week was an excellent performance of Turandot at Kennedy Center yesterday evening. My weakness for Puccini stems from early imprinting from my neuroscientist parents, who were as interested in classical music as anything except the brain itself.

This coming week, I’ll be thinking about a real-time functional MRI experiment that I’m interested in running with some close colleagues. Real time fMRI is a relatively new technique that allows one to reveal the BOLD signal as it is happening without further image processing.
Jim

Markoff on the new AI

The NY Times’ John Markoff sees AI as emerging from its “caution flag” state that it entered in the mid-1980’s.

Money quote for Krasnow Institute colleagues:

“I see the debate over whether we should build these artificial intellects as becoming the dominant political question of the century,” said Hugo de Garis, an Australian artificial-intelligence researcher, who has written a book, “The Artilect War,” that argues that the debate is likely to end in global war.

NIH to the rescue on the drug pipeline

ScienceInsider reports on NIH’s new initiative to develop drugs for orphan diseases. Money quote:

NIH leaders today announced a $120 million, 5-year plan to set up a drug development service center at the agency. The center’s chemists and toxicologists will modify promising compounds until they’re ready to be tested in people. The focus will be on rare and neglected diseases.

Science reporting

Here in Washington, we wake up to WTOP, the local all-news station. This morning, substantially before I had my coffee, I thought I heard the mention of a new clinical study (I wont mention the results here) for which the conclusions sounded really hard to believe. Of course there was no context at all, no mention of where the study was published and therefore no chance of critically evaluating the conclusions.

This strikes me as emblematic of a huge problem in reporting on science–particularly in the context of health: pithy press-releases with a news hook trump any critical evaluation for many of the larger news outlets. It’s another version of “if it bleeds, it leads”.
The public health result is confusion. Folks on one day hear that they should consume more X to stay healthy longer. On another day, they hear that X causes cancer. They don’t know what to believe and the obvious contradictions create a credibility-gap for scientists.
This is why the profession of science-writing is so terribly important. The best science writers provide plenty of context, critical evaluation and even meta-analysis so that members of the public and decision makers get a real sense of what the sum-total of the data suggest.
We need more science writers and less press-releases.
Jim

Give them an inch….

From today’s SCIENCE magazine:

A frantic grant-writing effort that has consumed biomedical research scientists this spring came to an end last week, resulting in a huge pile of new applications—more than 10 times larger than expected—to be reviewed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After this enthusiastic response, there will be many disappointed applicants: The rejection rate could run as high as 98%.

Mason Commencement 2009

Tomorrow morning, I’ll get up early and drive from Arlington to the Fairfax campus. I’ll park at the Institute and walk across the Mason campus in my University of Michigan academic regalia –FYI the trademark “M” isn’t a part of the get up–to join with colleagues at the Patriot Center, putting a full stop on the academic year that began last August. Commencement paradoxically derives from the verb to commence, but ends the academic year rather than beginning it. To my mind, that’s because commencement exercises aren’t about the faculty or the deans, but rather about the graduating students, who now are about to commence their post-degree lives.

And that thought brings back the memory of an earlier commencement day in May of 1978 in the main quadrangle of Amherst College. On that day, long before there were such things as the Web or Iphones, it was hot and muggy, the sun shown bright. The black cap and gown was hot. As I recall, many of my fellow graduating seniors wore, additionally, the green, red and yellow arm band which protested apartheid in South Africa. The College President John William Ward had been arrested for protesting the Vietnam War at the local airbase; I vividly remember receiving my diploma from his hand under his stern New England gaze and then it was done–I was off to commence my own life, one that initially took me to Capitol Hill and later to graduate school in Ann Arbor–and finally here to Mason, where I’m completing my 11th academic year, and watching our graduating seniors commence their journey.
To all of them, good luck!
Jim