More on the modern university

From this morning’s NY Times–the chair of the religion department at Columbia University rails against US graduate education, which he likens to the US auto industry in terms of its desperate need for restructuring.

I’m not at all sure I agree with him, but then the situation for science is very different than the situation with humanities and especially departments of religion.
For one thing, doctoral students in the sciences tend to receive higher stipends, they produce dissertations which are separable easily into journal papers and their job prospects aren’t bad–especially when you consider non-traditional tracks to academia.
Jim

The 1918 flu pandemic and what happens in the lungs

Here’s another very interesting article, Perrone et al. that we all can read because it’s open-access over at PLoS Pathogens.

For those who are non-scientists, read the author’s summary. Money quote:

Our data shows excessive immune cell infiltration in the lungs contributing to severe consolidation and tissue architecture destruction in mice infected with highly pathogenic (HP) influenza viruses, supporting the histopathological observations of lung tissue from 1918 and H5N1 fatalities.

Pandemic flu–cytokine storm

One of the key reasons why pandemic flu kills you is the cytokine storm–essentially a hyper-effective response of the immune system. The cytokine storm, in response to the invading flu virus, essentially leads to massive organ failure. Here’s a recent article from PNAS about strategies to control the flu-induced cytokine storm. The notion is that if we could do so, pandemic flu would, like seasonal flu, just be a miserable experience–not a life threatening one.

And here’s another article from PLoS showing just how complex this system really is. Recent attempts to dial down the cytokine storm using biologicals have been problematic.

Jim

The agonies of the academy

Andrew Delbanco in the NY Review of books–money quote:

In short, the financial crisis not only is threatening the livelihood of faculty and staff but is also degrading the experience of students. And despite the big hit on the big endowments, the further you go down the hierarchy of prestige, the worse the effects. For instance, the chancellor of the Connecticut community college system recently informed faculty that the first phase of the governor’s proposed budget cuts would require limiting student enrollment, reducing service in libraries and laboratories, and cutting back on the availability of advising, remedial tutoring, and childcare. On the West Coast, things are no better: San Jose State University has been forced by budget reductions to turn away thousands of qualified applicants for the first time in its hundred-year history.[9]

For years, we have witnessed a growing gap between rich and poor colleges, the privatization of public universities, and aggressive if not reckless investment and spending practices at wealthy institutions, where the allure of gain appears to have overwhelmed the consciousness of risk. Now we are also witnessing drastic budget contraction at the most fragile and vulnerable institutions. Higher education has always been a mirror of American society—and, for the moment, at least, the image it reflects is not a pretty one.

AEI event on neuroscience and free will

I went over to AEI yesterday for a very interesting panel discussion on what the recent advances in neuroscience and molecular biology mean for the concept of free-will. Of course for conservatives (AEI is a conservative think-tank), free will is a concept very near and dear.

The lead speaker was Professor James Q. Wilson of Pepperdine University, but I was far more interested in the perspectives of Sally Satel and David Brooks.
Satel seemed to hold the view that in spite of the gee-whiz factor of fMRI, we’re a very long way from being able to “see” free will in the human brain. As I’ve written here several times in the past I tend to agree: fMRI is in grave danger of being over-hyped.
Satel also had a very interesting perspective on the medicalization of addiction. From her standpoint, substance-abuse is qualitatively different from other medical diseases (such as cancer for example) in that its behavioral outcomes (which in the case of addiction are in fact the manifestation of the disease) are uniquely sensitive to external sanctions and rewards. I’m not so sure of that, but I’d like to see the data. So she wants to attach a free-will component to addiction.
David Brooks has talked to a lot of neuroscientists and is clearly a very quick study–we seem to find that in many University of Chicago alums. On the other hand, I find his conclusions in the area of brain sciences a bit glib. Just because the human brain is very complex doesn’t mean we can delineate the principles or rule-sets which allow things like mind to emerge. For Brooks, the brain’s complexity pretty much precludes us every finding out whether free will is an attractive illusion or, in some dualistic manner, entirely separate from the brain’s biology. Brooks also gives too much weight to unconscious processes in the brain–missing the point that the phenomenon of consciousness itself (the “hard problem”) is in fact the central driver for much of cognitive neuroscience.
I find David much more compelling on the economy and politics than on neuroscience. Yesterday evening on the Jim Lehrer hour, I found myself agreeing with him.
Jim

John Holdren on Fusion Energy

From ScienceInsider….

John Holdren, Obama’s science advisor, is actively supporting new investment in developing fusion energy as a carbon-free alternative source. He’s a fusion alum and so am I–just out of college, I interned for the New England congressional delegation looking at the possibility of developing fusion–the question then, as now, was containing a plasma efficiently. It’s not an easy nut to crack.
But if we were to crack it, it would really open up significant technological solution strategies to dealing with anthropogenic climate change.
Jim