In this blog entry, I’ll be writing about the most urgent metric for success at any institute: scientific discovery. Certainly if it were possible to create such outcomes with any degree of predictability then our more senior sister institutes would be vastly more successful. In fact, there is a large consensus (at least among US scientific administrators) that the major discoveries when they come, are the product of at least as much serendipity as anything else.

Nevertheless, it’s my belief that there are certain strategies that one can take (the best analogy would be to growing a garden) that can maximize the probabilities for success in this most important area.

First: laying out the garden bed. As with the necessities for good soil and water drainage, an Institute like Krasnow needs a fine infrastructure that includes the tools for research (instrumentation and the like) along with appropriate housing for scientific staff and breakout space for collaborative discussions and seminars. It helps to be surrounded by a beautiful environment (other examples are Woods Hole and the Santa Fe Institute).

Second: select good seed. As with everything, you get what you pay for. Here the notion is to select the absolutely best scientists (based on their track records and also their ideas) and then provide them with the salary, resources and time to focus on their science. This always entails both risk and opportunity. One of the Nobel Laureates involved early on in Krasnow’s founding only received his tenure after his Prize.

Third: Cultivate, fertilize and water. Discovery depends on experimentation which is not always predictable. There are “dry spells”. More resources must be supplied and scientists must be provided with the crucial time to think and digest their data. When bridge-funding is required, it must be, in general, provided.

Fourth: Sometimes hybridization can lead to better results. It’s my opinion that the lowest hanging scientific fruit (i.e. the zero-th order questions) are inherently trans-disciplinary in nature. To get at these opportunities for truly paradigm changing discoveries, investigators from different disciplines must collaborate and discuss. They must come together across the jargon-divides of their various fields.

Fifth: always be ready to re-seed. Sometimes things don’t work out. It’s crucial not to let those failures get in the way of trying again. But it’s also crucial to learn from one’s mistakes.

Any discussion of where we are headed must inevitably begin with a discussion of from where we have come. When I came on board as Krasnow Director in July of 1998, the amount of sponsored research at the Institute was less than $100,000. Freshly moved into our brand new facility there were sixteen people on staff (including all PI’s, postdocs and students). An early version of our website can be found here with the announcement of one our our first grants–a private award from the Whitaker Foundation. In the space of the following eight years, we have grown: the Institute has brought in over $16M in sponsored research, there are now 60 staff members and the Institute is now the de facto locus of two doctoral Ph.D. programs and ten research centers, cores or laboratories. The scientific alumni of the Institute are now in senior scientific positions around the world and our scientific success has been covered in the national and international media and at the highest levels of government.
Along the way, the constant was our seminar series which had begun in 1994. Here is the archived calendar of the seminar series from that first year. Over the next twelve years the Krasnow seminar series brought an always interesting set of talks to Fairfax on topics ranging from American Sign Language from the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience to the representation of odors in the rodent olfactory bulb. The current calendar can be found here.
Looking back, I would say that there were two major punctuation markers in the history of the Institute up to the current point. The first occurred with the transition of directors and the move in to the current facility over the 1997-1998 year. The second occurred in 2002, when the Institute successfully merged into George Mason University. We now stand at the threshold of the third of these markers–the construction of Krasnow Phase II and the opening of our Brain Imaging Center. In the next blog entry I will continue this discussion, but now focusing exclusively on the future.

Over the next several blog entries, I’ll be addressing the question of the future–that is the next five years at the Institute. The overarching questions that I hope to address are 1) how do we facilitate truly significant scientific discoveries at the Institute, 2) how do we build on our current success while managing change and 3) how do we relate to the rapidly emerging research enterprise at George Mason.

By way of introduction to these topics, the context must continue to be: excellence in research aimed at understanding the function (under both normal and pathological conditions) of the working human brain, while at the same time focusing on understanding both the origin of, and reverse engineering, its architecture and physiology.

These are among the most difficult scientific questions out there. The goal is for the Institute to make substantive contributions to this clearly trans-disciplinary field of inquiry. The challenge remains, as always, that scientific success is never assured, nor even predictable in its course. So we must create the optimal conditions for such fundamental discovery, rather than micromanaging the research programs of our scientific faculty.

Jim

So I’ve covered a lot of the Krasnow waterfront in this blog. To search
the index use the search tool in the upper-left corner. That’ll bring up
a listing of where that term was used in the blog. I tried it with the
term “Krasnow”. It worked pretty well.

Jim

This just in from our Design Build Contractor:
————————————————————————–

Mike,

Whiting-Turner is very excited to mobilize to the site in anticipation
of starting construction in the next few weeks. Below is a list of
activities that will be happening starting Tuesday February 14 and
continuing for the next two weeks:

1) Temporary site security fence delivered and installed
2) Construction dumpster delivered and placed
3) Construction gate installed
4) WT trailers will be delivered and installed
5) Temporary power, data, phones installed to trailer
6) Temporary toilet facilities placed on site
7) Tree selection and identification for future clearing activities

These activities will require that a few of the staff, faculty and
students of Krasnow to alter their current parking and walking habits.
There will not be any parking or access to the rear of the Krasnow
Institute unless in an emergency.

Jim Jaco will be on site Monday to work on laying out the specific areas
and identifying site fence boundaries. WT will work with Siemens to
coordinate with their site logistics.

Thanks,

Scott McEntee
Project Manager

I had a very interesting early morning breakfast at the Pentagon City Ritz this morning with two colleagues and a guest. The conversation started out with the guest asking some very pointed questions about neuroscience but quickly expanded into several interesting and intersecting threads:

One thread had to do with the link between deception (as in deceiving others), self-deception and memory (in all of its various kinds, but mainly focusing on episodic).

There was another thread that was centered on the notion of intracellular communication (signal transduction in the language of biologists) as a metaphor for network communication principles.

And the third thread dealt with the inherent contradiction of having collaborations be fruitful when elements of the data are classified (i.e. secret). By the way, this is not only true in the milieu of DOD, it’s also true in many areas of science, and further any area where intellectual property is at stake.

It seems to me that all of these threads should be elements of what we look at here at Krasnow: the first clearly in the field of cognitive neuroscience, the second partly in molecular cell biology, but also tied up with adaptive systems and the third in the domain of social complexity.

Jim

Robin Henig’s piece in today’s Sunday Times magazine is a good read. It’s fairly realistic about the complexities of deception and it presents some interesting alternative approaches to fMRI and EEG–the detection of microfacial movements, with the notion that those represent “cognitive leakage”.

Jim

I have a colleague from a former Soviet block country who honestly can’t understand the whole notion of compliance. When forced to face such issues (e.g. employee safety, laboratory animal use, chemical storage) he quite sincerely throws up his hands and attributes to the enforcers of such rules, the characteristics of the nameless soviet apparatchik–“do they want a bribe,” he wonders?

Compliance is absolutely critical to the safe and ethical conduct of basic cognitive research. Too many graduate students are trained in such a way that they view these procedures as a unnecessary burden on their day to day research. I have, over the course of my own training, heard many times the view that to be a really “intense” bench-top scientist, it’s almost desirable to flaunt the rules. Such is the road to disaster. You don’t carefully balance a centrifuge on that midnight run and the next thing you know there is P32 all over the room. You don’t have an approved protocol for that experiment that you just thought up and the next thing you know, laboratory animal-based research is suspended at your institution.

Compliance is best practice in research. It’s extraordinarily important to take it seriously.

Jim

Looks like 14 March will be when site “mobilization” will occur. And we’re looking at the 14 of April, four weeks later for the first selective clearing. So this is a slip as to when we begin. For those interested, the new building will be enclosed (i.e. tight) by early October. We’re still looking at late February 2007 for completion.

Jim

We went to a very interesting dinner with colleagues yesterday evening. Among the many interesting topics of conversation that came up, was the whole subject of inner city poverty, and how (with the exception perhaps of Katrina) it is mostly invisible to most people. That’s a problem I think. If suffering isn’t salient, then it’s difficult for people of good will to do something about it. Along the same lines, we were discussing the notion of how it is possible, in a culture of rampant materialism, to lose the ability to empathize with suffering. And that also is a kind of poverty, though of a different sort.

In the meantime, I am reading a wonderful book: “Inside The Neolithic Mind” by David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce (ISBN 0-500-05138-0) which was given to me by the head of our Center for Social Complexity, Claudio Cioffi. The Neolithic Revolution of course was the transition of Homo sapiens from being hunter/gatherers to agriculturalists. What is interesting about this book is that the author’s theorize this occurred not because of some Kipling-like “Just So Story” but rather as an epiphenomenon of social engagement with altered states of consciousness (such as those induced by drugs, near-death experiences and even chanting). And in turn, not unreasonably the authors posit that such group reactions to altered states of consciousness also led to religion. The book is a great combination of archeology and cognitive neuroscience. I highly recommend.

Jim