Two great talks today:

Gerald Edelman talked about his notion of neural darwinism as a way
of understanding the function of neocortex. Highly mentioned in his
talk was the research of Krasnow alumnus Jeff Krichmar and his work
on the Darwin X robot. This is a robot that has a functioning model
of a hippocampus to navigate its way around the robot equivalent of
Morris water maze. Also cool, was NSI’s (click on the link above) Segway
Soccer Brain-Based Device–which destroyed the CMU Robot in a human
robot team version of soccer.

The other brilliant talk was led by Henry Markham who is a close
collaborator with Krasnow’s own Giorgio Ascoli. Markham is using
IBM’s Blue Gene Super-Computer to essentially reconstruct (at an
extraordinary level of biological fidelity) a cortical column.
Driving Markham’s work is the notion of a recipe for a cortical
column built up by using massively parallel patch recordings of
neocortical neurons from living cortical columns. More on this work
at http://bluebrainproject.epfl.ch/people.htm.

Tomorrow another half day of talks and then a quick jet ride down to
Pasadena and Caltech.

Jim

Today I’m off to what promises to be a very interesting conference on cognition at IBM’s Almaden Conference Center in San Jose (click on the link above). Then a quick jump down to LA to meet with one of my editors for The Biological Bulletin (www.biobull.org). It’ll be enjoyable to focus on science entirely for the next several days–although, as a native Californian, I can’t promise I wont wax somewhat on the Golden State.

Jim

Well, it’s been delivered and here’s a couple of pictures. Congrats
especially to the Siemens team, and the co-chairs of our neuro-
imaging core: Professors Kalbfleisch and McCabe. It’s also really important to thank all of the Krasnow staff and friends, who made it possible for us to put in place a top-flight neuroimaging capability in such a short period of time.

Jim

So tomorrow, around about 2PM, the MRI should be craned into the current Krasnow Laboratory Facility. In what amounts to a giant-size Faraday cage, the scanner will be brought to life over the next several weeks and we should thereafter–perhaps this is the right phrase: be in business. We’ll have video of the more dramatic aspects of the delivery on the main Krasnow web site and I’ll link to it as soon as it’s available.

In other news, Saturday was the last day of classes for the semester and this blog, consequently nears the end of its first year. I’ll have some thoughts on the just passing academic year and what lies ahead, very soon.

Jim

An interesting link to a C-Net Story on folks who are producing a “sim-city” like version of creating a peace from a situation of violence. Of special interest to our colleagues interested in social complexity.

Money quote:
“The field of public diplomacy in games is the latest entry in the larger serious-games movement, in which government, universities, the health care industry and other institutions are beginning to use games to teach new concepts.”

Jim

Another academic year is rapidly drawing to a close. For me this is the end of my eighth year as Krasnow Director. As with all jobs that you’ve been in for a while, this one now has its seasons: the quiet of summer, the frenzy of the fall followed by the holiday break and then the renewed push towards commencement in May. In a sense, these seasons serve as punctuation marks for the academic year and allow for a pacing of activities.

This change in academic season we are losing two valued Krasnow colleagues as they move to another institution, but we are also gaining three new principal investigators in their place (more on the new arrivals in subsequent posts). Time moves on and the Institute evolves along with our University. Overall, the Krasnow Institute continues to grow and I expect this trend to actually accelerate over the next years.

In the meantime, let’s enjoy the season of the cap and gown and prepare for summer’s change of pace.

Jim

I returned to Ann Arbor in the early 1980’s to get my Ph.D. in neuroscience. I had left as a 13 year old, when my parents–academics, departed the University of Michigan for Caltech. One of my first memories of my return was being able to demonstrate the savante-like skill of being able, on cue, to point the direction to some landmark (like for example Burton Tower) without actually remembering either quite what the landmark was, nor really any distinct street directions. This was quite entertaining for the locals.

My memories of grad school range from the quiet pleasures of studying in Rackham (at the time, in a state of slow neglect) to trudging through the slush from my house on White Street up to the (now demolished) Neuroscience Laboratory Building to finish an experiment in the “wee hours of the morning” (to quote Sinatra). But there was always the fecund explosion in the Nicholas arboretum of Spring counterpointed by the crisp Fall football Saturdays.

The day I defended my dissertation, my sister came to town. She was living in Cambridge Massachusetts and after the excitement, we reminisced about growing up in Ann Arbor–especially at the historical time when Tom Hayden was starting the SDS and Kennedy announced the Peace Corps from the local train station.

Now her son is about to graduate himself from UofM’s School of Public Policy. And I can’t help but see a cycle that will continue for future generations from our family.

I recently took an old friend out to the Prince William campus, some twenty miles further west of the US Capitol than the Krasnow Institute. He’s a former NIH Lab Chief–one of those brilliant scientists who made training at Bethesda such a delight in the late 1980’s. Now he is a successful medical school department chair and as top flight a scientist as ever, running a group of perhaps twenty researchers in the interface between proteomics and cell biology.

We were going to visit the lab of another former NIH intramural scientist who moved to Mason in the last year with his entire group–also working in the area of proteomics, but interfaced more with the development of new clinical tests and procedures. They are old friends and colleagues.

As we pulled off the Prince William By-Pass and onto the very new Mason life sciences campus, we both noticed the headquarters of ATCC, once a stalwart of the biomedical establishment in Rockville Maryland and I pointed out where the new NIH funded $25M bio-research facility was going to be constructed.

When the two former NIH’ers met (and yes I was one myself, although I count simply as an NIH postdoctoral alumnus), the conversation turned both very technical, but also towards the excitement of building something absolutely brand new. Something beyond what was left behind in Bethesda. We toured the state-of-the-art labs and I couldn’t help but feel that something extraordinary is being built at George Mason these days.

At Prince William, the focus is on systems biology–an excellent counterpoint to the systems neuroscience perspective of Krasnow and the integrative neuroscience focus of the new Janelia Farm facility of Howard Hughes Medical Institute, just a few miles up the road near Leesburg.

On the ride back to Krasnow, my old friend and I both remarked on what a remarkable morning it had been. I think soon it will be good to write a field guide to life sciences research at this new University, George Mason.

Jim

A week from this coming Monday, our 3T magnet will be delivered. It’ll be about a six hour operation and involve some fairly big cranes. We’ll be video recording the delivery and I hope to have some of that content up on the main Krasnow web site shortly thereafter.

In the meantime, final site clearing permits have been issued in Richmond for the Krasnow Expansion project, so I expect clearing to commence shortly.

Jim

There are times, even in science (where nominally the entire effort is designed to elucidate nature’s truth), where there is a need for the keeping of secrets. This is especially true where the long term interests of the institution may be at risk. It is also without a doubt true under the many circumstances where it is both ethical and obligated to protect an individual’s privacy.

The most potentially awkward situations involve those times when the two needs (institutional welfare and individual privacy) intersect. Example: when you know something that will affect the future of another colleague, or the converse when you know something about the future of a colleague that might affect the institution.

One area of ethics research that I think should be futher studied is this nexus between the secrecy obligations of the institution and those of the individual. Secrecy as distinct from privacy.

Jim