Author: jlolds

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

Architecture in Washington DC

Heard yesterday at the Embassy of Finland during the Finnish national holiday festivities:

The embassies have the only interesting architecture in Washington

An interesting comment that I’ll need to think about. Personally, I find the monuments on the Mall quite strikingly beautiful in the right light (for example early morning), although I’m not sure if I would call them interesting.

However, without question, the Finnish Embassy is one of the most interesting and beautiful buildings in Washington–just opposite the Vice President’s mansion on Massachusetts Avenue. According to the Ambassador, it’s also green–although I’m not sure if she was referring to its sustainability or the patina of its copper exterior. Perhaps both.

The Original Krasnow Board

Amazing what an iPhone camera can do with a bit of editing. The photo is of the Institute’s governing board about the time of the turn of the century.

No, there were no iPhones at the time, but I did just take the picture of the photo because these were individuals who played a key role in the founding of the Institute.

Back Row (left to right): Alan Merten, Harold Morowitz, Bill Nitze, Ted Braithwaite, Mark Friedlander, Gene Samburg, George Johnson, Robert Gambino, Maurice Scherrens, John Burris and Tom Wise.

Front Row (left to right): myself, Katherine Wallman, Virginia Pomata, Patricia Kluge, Peter Stearns and Julius Axelrod.

Among those in the photo are: a Nobel laureate, three college presidents, a UN ambassador/RAF fighter pilot, three biologists, a psychiatrist, three political appointees, an author of over 100 books and a corporate CEO. Can you identify them?

Health Hackers

From Saturday’s WSJ, this essay on health hacking: at its most glorified, rolling your own molecular biology. I first heard about this back in 2008 at Scifoo. It’s certainly taken off. The problem of course is that it’s not science without sufficient statistical power. Although, it certainly wouldn’t require any statistics to detect an unlucky SNP.

Publics in Distress

America’s big public research universities are having a tough time of it lately, and it’s not just in their athletic programs. Fundamentally, they are being squeezed by the Great Recession hitting state budgets and parents’ tuition savings accounts at the same time.  Whether sequestration happens or not, Federal R&D is likely to trend downwards for some time, and this will have an enormous effect on the economic engine of research that Vannevar Bush envisioned, and subsequently architected,  mid-20th century.

Fundraising is being hurt, not only because of some very high profile PR disasters, but also simply because donors are holding on to their money in times of uncertainty. While the elite privates can count on enormous endowments to carry them through, the publics are, to a large extent (and with some notable exceptions) much more dependent on state support and tuition.

What to do? Who is the lender of last resort for America’s public research universities?

Increasingly the answer to that question is either out of state or overseas. Out of state students pay “full freight” or even premium rates and their recruitment potentially can subsidize the publics as they are being squeezed within their states. Of course, without growth, those are classroom seats that are no longer available for in state students. Which brings up the question of the core purpose of public education: to provide quality higher education for in state students. Or is it: to conduct excellent sponsored research? Or some mixture of both?

We live in very interesting times.

Art at the Krasnow Institute continued….

Is art conducive to good science? I think so. There is something about artistic expression which intuitively hooks into the process of scientific creativity.

At some crucial point, a scientist takes a leap of faith, with a hypothesis, that sets up a trajectory of experiments, data gathering and assumed risk. To my mind, this isn’t so different from the gamble that an artist takes in conceptualizing a piece.

One of the nice aspects of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study is the interplay between natural beauty, science and art. Today the forest outside my office window is denuded of leaves; the trees look, of course, like neuronal dendrites.

While inside our cellular imaging core, our researchers are imaging neuronal dendrites–real ones using confocal microscopy.

In the meantime, 20 km away in downtown DC, Krasnow PI Paul So’s Hamiltonian Gallery is an another example of how inspired physics (Paul is a professor in the Physics department here at Mason) and art can interplay off one another.