Journal Club

I asked permission to sit in on the Journal Club that’s held regularly by our neuroscience doctoral students today. It was a real treat. They are a bright bunch.

A key point of discussion concerned the sort of operational definitions that are fairly common in behavioral neuroscience (e.g. habit learning, spatial learning). These definition are extremely important in the design of experiments and in the interpretation of results and they evolve over time: model-based and model-free were the two relevant contexts for today’s paper from Redish’s lab at University of Minnesota.

Central to these neuroscience approaches is the holy grail of dissociating the different types of learning that occur between regions of the brain. The problem of course is that many brain regions participate in any one kind of learning. Further, any experimental design, no matter how excellent (in my opinion, the late David Olton was among the very best) is likely to have any single learning experience confounded by multiple types of learning.

Jeremy Berg steps down at NIGMS

ScienceInsider has the story here.

Money quote here:

Besides running his own institute, Berg pitched in on NIH-wide projects. He helped lead efforts to overhaul the NIH peer-review system, devise new awards for young scientists, and shore up basic behavioral research at NIH. He’s also known for his openness with the research community. For example, he recently posted data on the NIGMS blog on how peer-review scoring works and a much-discussed analysis suggesting that midsize labs are the most productive.

Chistopher Hitchens on Washington

This blog is usually concerned with the intersection of science and policy, but I write it within several miles of the U.S. Capitol, hence I can’t resist to link here to Christopher Hitchen’s recent piece reviewing fiction about my home town.

Hitchens, recently diagnosed with cancer, remains one of the most intelligent writers of our time. And he really is funny, too. For loyal readers who aren’t from Washington, his piece gives you a flavor of its famous contradictions. Enjoy.

The Great American Research University: Endangered?

A National Academy Panel visited the subject recently and a news report is here. Money quote:

Panelist James Duderstadt, former president of the University of Michigan, suggested that the country needs a national education policy that encompasses its research universities. “Most countries have one, and it usually includes a statement about creating X number of world-class research universities,” Duderstadt said. “Our emphasis has always been on providing access. But maybe we should have a national policy that says we need to have a certain number of global research universities.”

The scientific talk

My parents used to tell me that, as working scientists, they far preferred the badly delivered talk replete with lots of excellent data than the reverse. Although, I think we would all agree, the optimal would be a superbly delivered talk filled with brand new, highly significant results that are unexpected within the current paradigm.

Too often, in my experience we have the worst of all worlds: virtually no data delivered in an uninteresting manner. It seems to me this is a matter of training: we should mentor trainees to turn down speaking invitations unless they have some real new data and we should teach them to prepare to deliver talks well (e.g. don’t read your slide deck to the audience).

Thanksgiving

Tomorrow is the day that, here in the US, we celebrate a holiday called Thanksgiving. Other than the preferred food (turkey which I find sort of bland), it’s a wonderful occasion to silently appreciate all the small and large things that actually are going well. There are many of them, not least, for me, is the pleasure of communicating with readers, new and old, here. Thank you. And Happy Thanksgiving!

In this week’s New Yorker: The Biological Bulletin Editorial Board

Not surprisingly (it’s Thanksgiving week here in the US) the current edition of The New Yorker is on food. If you get a chance, be sure to take in Burkhard Bilger’s piece, “Nature’s Spoils–The Delights of Fermented Food”. Two of The Biological Bulletin’s editorial board members, Lynn Margulis and Margaret Mcfall-Ngai, are quoted extensively. I’m using an email interface into blogger, so I can’t
link to the actual article (the link is to the abstract) and since it’s current, my guess is that it’s
still behind the firewall. Nevertheless, for loyal readers who take
The New Yorker, it’s a real treat.