More on Obama’s Science Policy: II

I’m at home with a nasty cold today, which gave me a chance to very carefully read the Sunday papers. If you get a chance, check out the review of Irene Pepperberg’s new book on Alex the parrot.

Now back to thinking about the new President’s science policy. Yesterday we visited with the legislative director of one of the big scientific societies here in Washington and both of us agreed that what happens at NIH will be of major importance. The National Institutes of Health have had a long successful history with both sides of the aisle. Democrats and Republicans are in general agreement that NIH basically “works” (in contrast to the rest of the government). Whether or not this meme is true, it’s out there and has played to the agency’s effectiveness over the years. In particular the mix of using approximately 10% of the agency’s budget to support a “high risk, high payoff” intramural campus and 90% to support a rigorously peer-reviewed extramural investigator-initiated grants program has taken on the permanence of received dogma. With the current economic challenges and the resultant chronic decrease in discretionary budget funding, there is a worry that NIH may have lost it’s groove in a more fundamental way. When only 5% of new grants are getting funded, but 30% of them are scientifically worthy of support, deciding who gets the green light begins to be similar to arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
To be fair, NIH is engaged in a deep conversation within and among its external stakeholders about reform, but under the new administration (and particularly with a new NIH director) one might expect this process to become more urgent and potentially more consequential. One major challenge for the agency is how to reward scientific risk-taking more effectively. Currently the existing peer-review system tends to work against the “bleeding edge” which may delay important public health benefits of biomedical research. There’s also the question of how to more effectively promote scientific collaborations between the intramural scientists (on the Bethesda campus) with their colleagues in academia who may be funded by the extramural program. Currently the old “firewall” between the two branches of biomedical research funding is under siege, but the wall hasn’t come tumbling down yet. It probably should.
More fundamentally, the new Administration might consider reducing the number of NIH institutes (I forget how many of them there are, but it’s in the double digits) and figuring out a way to increase coordination among the institutes and between other federal agencies. One way to do this, is to substantially increase the power of the NIH Director at the expense of the individual Institute Directors. The new Pioneer grants undertaken by current NIH Director Zerhouni are a good first step. But more more could be done.
Finally the Bethesda, intramural NIH needs to figure out a way to balance the critical need to maintain transparency in research funding (e.g. dealing with scientific conflict of interest) with equal need to create a pleasant enough employment environment to attract the very best and the brightest. Those individuals don’t need to come to Bethesda to be well supported and to thrive–but we want them to chose to do so. Striking that balance is going to be really important for creating a intramural program that fulfills its mission.
The incoming Obama administration of course realizes, positive changes only comes about when you chose the right leadership team. His choice for NIH director, will give us a very big clue about what will happen, change-wise, with this extraordinary agency.
Jim

President-elect Obama and science policy: I

The Obama administration will face some immediate science policy challenges when it assumes power on January 20. To my mind, first among them is the urgent need to return to the notion that Vannevar Bush put forward mid-20th century that federal R&D investment is dual use: it can improve the national and public health and serve as a primer to the US economic engine. Given the current economic crisis, Keynesian-type government spending might be targeted both at infrastructure (think: mass transportation, green energy, bridges–hopefully to somewhere) and science R&D.

The Decade of the Mind project is a perfect example of how such a priming investment could be implemented. New federal investment across multiple agencies would support cross-cutting initiatives that would heal, model, enrich and understand the emergence of “mind” from brain. The public health aspects of the Project might be centered at the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Veterans Affairs. One might imagine the the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense playing the central role in supporting research to reverse-engineer brains for better robotics, while the National Science Foundation would aim directly at the basic science questions–with implications for understanding the deep links that extend all the way from physics to intelligence. 
While the “Decade” Initiative might lead to cures for diseases of the mind (such as Alzheimer’s), the technology developed along the way (for example autonomous “intelligent” vehicles or brain-machine interface prosthetics) could serve to prime the economic pump–as those inventions are transferred to the private sector. At the same time, the advances in K-20 education made possible under the Decade Project–as neuroscientists begin to collaborate fruitfully with educators–will improve the “national health” in terms of competitiveness in the global economy.
This is not to say that there aren’t other daunting science policy challenges. Energy and Climate Change will certainly be at the fore. But, as I’ve argued before, many elements of these other challenges thread tightly into a Decade of the Mind project.  Certainly understanding the national security elements at the intersection of Energy and Climate Change requires a better understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that subserve human behavior. These cognitive mechanisms once understood, can lead to more predictive computational models that may give us better insights into how Climate and Energy-use might lead to mass perturbation of human social behaviors.
Jim

Election Day 2008

Well today we elect a new President. Hopefully we’ll have a clean election and clarity by morning. Here at George Mason, it’s been wonderful to watch the voting shuttle vans taking students to the polling places. You can feel the excitement.

Tomorrow (if the results are clear) we’ll begin to analyze the science agenda of the new administration. We’ll be paying close attention to what information we can glean of the transition team, particularly in the context of the science agenda and how that agenda may play out for the Decade of the Mind initiative.
The economic crisis of course intersects with our scientific agenda and will certainly constrain our new President.
Jim

Cognitive neuroscience and the election (NY Times Op Ed)

Sam Wang and Joshua Gold (of Princeton and Penn respectively) bring cognitive neuroscience to the US general election next week:

If decisions are lurking somewhere in the brains of undecided voters, could brain imaging methods reveal their inclinations? Not yet. Recent research has shown that when undecided voters looked at images of candidates, their brains’ emotional centers were often activated. But this reveals little information about the content of their thoughts. Such research serves mainly to demonstrate how hard it is for scientists to physically trace complex concepts like preference.

New Gates Foundation grants

The Gates Foundation pursues a pretty innovative approach in awarding research grants. Here’s the key quote from the Financial Times:

To apply for a grant, the foundation requires only the outline of a hypothesis and a way of testing it: it does not need applicants to provide data to support their theory, a requirement that puts many researchers, especially those from the developing world, in a chicken-and-egg conundrum.

I’ve been urging our PI’s to think outside the box lately about funding sources. This looks like a pretty good idea, although it needs to be tied to world health.

Jim

Dopamine in the news

Clive Crook from the Financial Times on a study (Stice et al) that just came out in SCIENCE.

Money quote:

Fatter volunteers had less activation in the dorsal striatum part of the brain than their leaner counterparts as they drank. This region releases dopamine, a brain chemical, in response to food and drink. The amount released corresponds to the degree of pleasure produced by the experience

I wonder if this applies to bankers and money?

Here’s a link to SCIENCE magazine’s podcast about the article.
Jim

Smarter or Dumber?

You’re recall Nicholas Carr’s very controversial article in the Atlantic over the summer that suggested that on-line searching was making us stupid. Today, CNN.com reports on a study which purports to show the opposite! Dr. Gary Small used fMRI showed that:

Members of the technologically advanced group had more than twice the neural activation than their less experienced counterparts while searching online. Activity occurred in the region of the brain that controls decision-making and complex reasoning

Meanwhile cross town rival…

Liz Zelinski, a professor of gerontology and psychology at the University of Southern California, said the findings about the brain activity differences aren’t surprising and offered this analogy: “If you wanted to study how hard people can exercise, and you take people that already exercise and people that don’t exercise, aren’t they going to be different to start out?”

Don’t you think fMRI is getting a bit oversold these days?

Jim

Another Nobel Prize for MBL in Woods Hole

This time for the discovery of Green Fluorescent Protein or GFP–used now ubiquitously in all fields of biosciences:

Japan’s Osamu Shimomura and Americans Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien shared the prize for their research on green fluorescent protein, or GFP, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

And where does Shimomura work?

Shimomura, born in 1928, works at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and the Boston University Medical School.

Congrats to Director Gary Borisy and all the good folks at the MBL!

Jim

Financial Times on Machine Learning

Alane Cane has written a spectacular piece in today’s FT regarding the limitations of AI and cognitive computing. Featured in the article is IBM’s Dharmendra Modha:

IBM was a pioneer in the field and today continues to invest heavily in AI research. Dharmendra Modha, a scientist in the company’s California research laboratory is working on cognitive computing, which he defines as a computer model that simultaneously exhibits characteristics seated in the human brain, including perception and emotion.

His aim is to discover how the brain works, not how the mind works, he is quick to emphasise.

Last year, his group achieved a milestone by managing to simulate the operation of a mouse brain on an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer.

He notes: “We deployed the simulator on a 4096 processor Blue Gene/L supercomputer with 256 megabytes of memory per processor.

We were able to represent 8m neurons and 6,300 synapses (connections) per neuron in the one terabyte main memory of the system.”

There will be, of course, a considerable time lag before the benefits of this research are seen in actual products.

Mr Modha thinks it could be 10 years before cognitive computing of the kind he is working on makes its debut in productivity and security systems. It is, however, a giant leap from 1956 when an IBM supercomputer of the day simulated the firing of a mere 512 neurons

Read the whole article!

Jim