Money quote from Nature:
In a speech at the neuroscience meeting, NIH institute heads acknowledged the inevitable outcome: the success rate for grant applications across the agency dropped from 31% in 1998 to 23% last year (see graph). Next year, this is expected to fall to 19%. “We have really good grants that we can’t afford to pay,” says Story Landis, head of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. “The demand took off just as the NIH budget was landing.”
An interesting finding from Budinger et al. in Neuroscience: the find that A1 cortex has anatomical connections which suggest multimodal sensory processing.
Jim
We had an excellent comment on the Allen Brain Atlas blog entry–something which hasn’t occurred very frequently in the year and a half since I started this project. Just a quick reminder that comments are welcome, but moderated. I think they add a lot and I’d like to see more of them.
Jim
A very interesting finding on the normal physiological activity of an enzyme that plays a big role in Alzheimer’s Disease (click on the link above). Turns out it plays a role in myelination!
Jim
The Krasnow MRI Brain Imaging Center will be open for scientific use by PI’s in January. For the latest information, please go to http://krasnow.gmu.edu/nicki .
The last two evenings have been just spectacular for the Institute. Monday evening, Krasnow’s Giorgio Ascoli, gave a lecture on “Virtual Brains” to an enthusiastic audience in Mason’s Center for the Arts in Fairfax. And yesterday afternoon’s Advisory Board meeting and subsequent Brain Imaging Center open house celebration was capped off by a very substantial gift pledge from Krasnow Advisory Board member Patricia Kluge. It’s weeks like this one that make my job so incredibly rewarding.
Kudos go to all of the Krasnow and Mason staff who worked so tirelessly to make these events successful.
Jim
Ramachandran and Oberman on the possibility that the mirror system is involved in autism (click on the link above).
Money quote:
“An even more intriguing possibility would be to use biofeedback to treat autism or at least alleviate its symptoms. Doctors could monitor the mu waves of a child with autism and display them on a screen in front of the patient. If the child’s mirror neuron functions are dormant rather than completely lost, it may be possible for him or her to revive this ability by learning–through trial and error and visual feedback–how to suppress the mu waves on the screen. Our colleague Pineda is pursuing this approach, and his preliminary results look promising. Such therapies, though, should supplement rather than replace the traditional behavioral-training techniques.
Another novel therapeutic approach might rely on correcting chemical imbalances that disable the mirror neurons in individuals with autism. Our group (including students Mikhi Horvath and Mary Vertinsky) has suggested that specialized neuromodulators may enhance the activity of mirror neurons involved in emotional responses. According to this hypothesis, the partial depletion of such chemicals could explain the lack of emotional empathy seen in autism, and therefore researchers should look for compounds that stimulate the release of the neuromodulators or mimic their effects on mirror neurons. One candidate for investigation is MDMA, better known as ecstasy, which has been shown to foster emotional closeness and communication. It is possible that researchers may be able to modify the compound to develop a safe, effective treatment that could alleviate at least some of autism’s symptoms.”
Yesterday’s Sunday NY Times magazine has an excellent story of what can happen when a scientist goes bad. For young investigators it’s an important read.
Money quote:
“He presented fraudulent data in lectures and in published papers, and he used this data to obtain millions of dollars in federal grants from the National Institutes of Health — a crime subject to as many as five years in federal prison. Poehlman’s admission of guilt came after more than five years during which he denied the charges against him, lied under oath and tried to discredit his accusers.”
This has been a very busy weekend. We’re getting a manuscript ready
for submission, I’m finishing up a powerpoint for Tuesday’s Advisory
Board Meeting and I’m working on an editorial for the December issue
of The Biological Bulletin.
Interestingly the board presentation got me thinking about how much
is going on: three open searches, an on-going recruitment in addition
to the new space and the brain imaging center. The Institute could
find itself in the position next Fall of taking in as many as 22 new
scientific staff members in various groups. I sure hope we have the
space to accommodate everyone.
In the meantime, it’s about time to think about fundraising for
Krasnow Phase III. This will the the follow-on second 12,500 square
foot expansion that will take us up to around 50,000 total square
feet of research space.
Jim
A wonderful New Yorker Review of William Clark’s new book “Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University” (click on the link above).
Money quote:
Today, by contrast, dwindling public support has forced university administrators to look for other sources of funding, and to assess professors and programs through the paradigm of the efficient market. Outside backers tend to direct their support toward disciplines that offer practical, salable results—the biological sciences, for instance, and the quantitative social sciences—and universities themselves have an incentive to channel money into work that will generate patents for them. The new regime may be a good way to get results, but it’s hard to imagine that this style of management would have found much room for a pair of eccentrics like James Watson and Francis Crick, or for the kind of long-range research that they did.
