Here’s an interesting finding: Miller and Sweatt have demonstrated that DNA methylation (essentially dynamic covalent modifications of genes) plays a crucial role in hippocampal fear conditioning. It’s published in NEURON. I linked to the Faculty of 1000 citation for those who don’t have access to the journal.

The significance is that the genome itself can be modified and essentially serve as an engram. This is a really old idea, but this new wrinkle gives the notion new life.

Jim

RIM’s blackberry servers have been down since last evening. This is the service that kept going during 9/11 and that much of the federal government uses. I have a blackberry also. Makes me wonder how much to count on it in the future. Of course, it’s kind of nice to give my thumbs a rest.

One of the real challenges for the Institute going forward is to leverage our current imaging technologies for scientific discovery while at the same time, taking the calculated risks on what the next significant technologies will be for the field.

In the area of simple system models (like Alpysia or Drosophila), one of the huge challenges has been to create a functional map of the entire nervous system. Here is one approach that I think might be fruitful. I’ve always been interested in the aequoerin as a calcium reporter because it signals with a photon in the visual spectrum at very high temporal resolution. It always seemed like it might be an ideal way to look at the activation of protein kinase C (which typically needs Ca2+ for activation) at high levels of temporal resolution within living cells.

Jim

Our hearts go out to students and faculty at Virginia Tech where tragedy struck today. The loss of life is horrific. I just received word from the director of our sister institute, VBI, that all of their folks are OK.

All of us at Krasnow send our condolences to colleagues, friends and relatives at Tech.

Jim

A delightful afternoon as friends of the Krasnow Institute enjoyed the Verizon Executive Box to watch the Wizards play the Bulls. Outside the Verizon Center the winds were howling as a Nor’easter roared through the Washington area. But inside, we got into the game as the play-off bound Wizards lost to the Chicago Bulls.

This is the link to find out about the symposium and register.

Jim

I noticed the other day that the original Institute for Advanced Study acts in some ways as a university with four academic units or schools. As the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study is an academic unit now of George Mason University, it then shouldn’t be too surprising that we’ll be standing up two new departments within the Institute in time for the next academic year. These will be a department of molecular neuroscience (which I will initially chair in addition to continuing to serve as institute director) and a department of social complexity (which Claudio Cioffi has agreed to chair). Of course there will continue to be Krasnow PI’s from other academic units and collaborative threads to the rest of Mason in addition to our sister institutions around the world. The two new departments will play key, but not sole roles in the two interdisciplinary doctoral programs: social complexity and neuroscience.

My vision is that the Institute will remain first and foremost, a center for research excellence, reaching across disciplinary divides, while at the same time playing an ever increasing role in graduate education at the intersection of neuroscience, cognitive psychology and computer sciences–all within the context of complex adaptive systems.

It certainly now looks like the next phase of the Krasnow Expansion (Phase II) will happen. This will double the 13,000 sq. foot addition that we are taking delivery of in the next month or so. That would have the Institute topping off at about 50,000 sq. feet which seems just about right. I’ll have more details as they become available.

Jim

I had lunch at my club in Washington today (the discussion covered everything from neuroscience to nuclear weapons detection) with one of my favorite board members. This afternoon I’ve been ensconced in a small room at the very top of the old mansion (under the rafters but with a great view overlooking Massachusetts Avenue). It’s been the perfect place to work on a number of projects all of which are coming due at approximately the same time–hence the paucity of writing here over the past week. I’m taking a break however to consider the room itself: the walls are covered with member book covers, a letter from Mark Twain and some doodles made my President Theodore Roosevelt. There is an excellent network connection and my cell phone works quite well this high up….all in all, a wonderful place to get writing done on a Thursday afternoon.

Jim

All universities have policies. They cover all sorts of things germane to science ranging from regulating direct charges to grants all the way to scientific misconduct. I spend a fair amount of my time as a university administrator, thinking about these policies. Concretely, it seems that there is a fair amount of my time that is spent on university committees working on the language of these documents so that they both comply with relevant laws and protect the interests of George Mason.

At the same time, it seems as if there certainly was a time when there were less of these policies. When my father was a professor, the laboratory he ran was subject to much less regulation. And yet, it managed to produce good science, avoid breaking the law and even educate students. My concern, as an administrator, is that we may be, by creating policies to cover everything, creating too great a bureaucratic burden for working scientists. A good colleague of mine, thinks just the opposite: well written policies actually protect the PI, but laying out the “red lines” and removing the ambiguities inherent in both doing sponsored research and managing people.

At one level, the policy explosion simply reflects the way our society has changed writ large: there are many more laws…and many lawyers.

Jim