So I suppose the first question is why is the director of an Institute for Advanced Study so interested in George Mason starting a medical school?

The short answer is that neuroscience (my own field) ultimately is tied closely to understanding the phenomenon of human mind, and the many brain diseases that affect it. Thus, the notion of translational neuroscience (that is bringing the fruits of brain research to the patient bed-side) is extremely important to me. Growing neuroscience writ large at Mason implies having the kind of educational and research opportunities that are inherent to the medical education environment.

At another level, I look at the empirical data and can’t help but notice that universities with medical schools operate at a research scale qualitatively larger than those without. This university (and the region) needs top-flight Mason research to grow. Medical education at Mason will act as a catalyst for such growth. Indeed, as I’ve mentioned before, biomedical research can be an economic engine for the region.

That said, there are many reasons for not “cloning” the existing medical school models. For one thing, there is an on-going revolution in medical education timed with the recent 100th anniversary of the famous Flexner Report. That revolution, loosely called “Flexner II“, is a wave we need to catch. So we need to be looking at extremely innovative models such as those at Case-Western/Cleveland Clinic and Mayo, rather than the legacy programs.

Another reason for being innovative in our approach is that it will differentiate us from existing medical programs, around the Commonwealth and the United States. Mason has tremendous strength at innovative approaches. We can leverage this asset.

Finally, the region (i.e. the National Capital Region) has specific medical needs that are different from other areas of the country. As a potential terrorist target, the Washington area, needs more critical care physicians in addition to doctors with an advanced understanding of infectious disease, and if we’re smart, we can tailor our nascent program to those needs. Such shaping of our program can leverage our existing National Center for Biodefense.

It used to be that institutions of higher education with medical schools also owned their hospitals. But with the massive changes in the business model for medical care, this often doesn’t make sense. So Mason’s medical program will need clinical partners. Such partners would gain greatly from the research prestige and success already present at Mason, in such areas as cancer biology, proteomics and of course neuroscience.

In the next blog entry, I’ll write about evidence-based medicine, nanotechnology, medical robotics and how they might change the medical student curriculum.

Jim

It’s muggy here! But it’s good to be back. In the next couple of blog entries I’ll speculate about what a Mason Medical School might actually look like.

Jim

An excellent meeting with our Russian Colleagues today. I particularly enjoyed meeting Larissa A. Tsvetkova, the dean of the Faculty of Psychology at St. Petersburg State University, home of Krasnow’s own Lev Vekker.

Also enjoyed learning about Sandia Lab’s exciting new initiatives in the Cognitive Sciences and meeting Russ Skocypec and Stephem Roehrig along with old colleague Chris Forsythe.

Sandia is a crucial nexus to the national “mind” strategy.

Tomorrow, back on the plane and headed to Dulles. And home.

Jim

We broke through the clouds at about 10,000 feet yesterday over a very rainy Albuquerque airport. It had actually been icing on our decent and the landing was a particularly exciting cross-wind touchdown–I hate to think about the stresses on the Airbus’ composite tail as it moved the plane back to the center line of the runway. The precipitation at the taxi-stand was a cold one and I literally dumped my bags in the back to get out of the weather.

This morning at 8AM, the meeting begins–a Russia US collaboration meeting on neurotechnologies over at Sandia Lab’s International Activities Center. What are neurotechnologies anyway? The first thing that comes to mind is the so-called “brain-machine interface” that defines the future neuroengineering of prosthetics. But I would additionally put in that category any of the non-invasive brain imaging technologies, drugs and machines that augment cognition and finally hardware (circuits) that have some of the characteristics of neurons.

Should be interesting.

Jim

Or perhaps another field to be called geriatric neuroeconomics? Tyler Cowen links to this paper in his blog Marginal Revolution today. Apparently our economic sophistication is on an inverted U-curve with respect to age. Is there a neural basis for that?

Jim

I’ve heard Vernor speak before. Somehow, I’m quite skeptical about his claim that computers will be able to exceed our cognitive capabilities relatively soon. AI has been over-sold for a very long time, so the field still suffers from credibility issues. Nevertheless, it seems to me that merely throwing Moore’s Law at something as architecturally complex as the human brain is problematical. Each neuron in our brain is a whole lot more than an integrate-and-fire computational element. Each neuron represents a constellation of hierarchical biochemical and biophysical processes constrained by an orderly, yet unique morphology. There are something like 100 billion of these neurons and each of them as perhaps 10,000 connections to others. How you go from a digital computer to something approaching the human brain is daunting.

I suppose the ultimate question is: will a PC pass the Turing Test anytime soon.

Jim

Apparently a neuroscience graduate student from Ann Arbor (where I got my PhD by the way) got herself in some temporary hot water on her neuroscience blog. The problem stemmed from putting up some graphs from a journal article that she was critiquing. When she replaced the actual published graphs with her own version of the same, the trouble went away.

Jim

Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education on-line has an excellent article about a report that has recently been released in the journal Academic Medicine. Bottom line: the median annual cost for running an institutional review board (to protect human subjects) is around $800,000. That’s a lot of money. The use of human subjects in research is an expensive business and universities need to budget with those expenses firmly in mind.

Jim

I am torn between two potential syllabi for my Fall graduate course, Neuroscience Methods. The course has been taught in the past as essentially a grantsmanship class with a heavy dose of critical scientific thinking along with experimental design.

The other idea is to actually present a survey of extant neuroscience methods, with the notion that, these days, in order to be a truly successful investigator, one needs to at least be able to understand how disparate methods can be deployed to test hypotheses. So in this case, the syllabus would be focused on techniques.

I’d value feedback from our students (and others) on which might be more valuable.

Jim

A colleague of mine and I had lunch today at an Indian restaurant in Fairfax. We are thinking of writing a book together and the discussion was going back and forth over the different threads that we might include (more on that at some other time). By the by, I was complimented over my time management. I guess the idea was that it must be difficult for an institute director to contemplate writing a book while running a science enterprise at the same time. Must be the time management skills. After thinking for a moment I responded that the only possible way I was able to manage my time at all is having a superb support staff (both here at George Mason and in Woods Hole).

One trick to time management in senior positions is getting comfortable with the power of a scheduler. You give up some of your autonomy (the ability to set your own calendar) in return for the coordination and flexibility that comes from having one central node where all the competing time commitments can be dealt with. The advent of reliable (and free) on-line calendaring systems and then the ability to push that calendar information to mobile devices has also helped make the system work for us.

Jim