Neurotechnology Initiative

Rita Colwell gave a wonderful talk up on Capitol Hill yesterday as part of an initiative being put forward by the Center for Neurotechnology Studies. Dr. Colwell is of course the former Director of the National Science Foundation and a terrific scientist. She is now at the University of Maryland, but her words still carry tremendous weight around this town. I had the privilege of reacting to her talk with some comments of my own on the subject–my belief is that such a neurotechnology initiative can be deeply enter twined with the Decade of the Mind project. These technologies essentially would allow us to ask the scientific questions necessary to “crack” the mind. The Center for Neurotechnology Studies is a part of our sister institute, The Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.

Congress and then Grants

I spent yesterday up on Capitol Hill. It was quite hot and humid and reminded me nothing so much as of my intern days working for the New England Congressional Caucus. Today I’ve got a stack of NSF grants in front of me to review.

Jim

Douglas Hofstadter’s new Book "I am a Strange Loop"

Chistoph Adami writes the review in the May 25 issue of Science Magazine. Interesting comparison to Koch’s recent book, The Quest for Consciousness.

The money quote:

In fact, Hofstadter’s book and Koch’s recent The Quest for Consciousness (3) make for an interesting juxtaposition. Each addresses the same problem but entirely on different levels. Yet both authors reach some of the same conclusions, sometimes using precisely the same metaphor (as when they compare the activity of “making up one’s mind” in terms of a voting process). In the end, both authors could have profited from peeking at each other’s arsenal: Hofstadter would probably be delighted to see some of the putative neural underpinnings of consciousness, to peer underneath the strange loop as it were, at the inordinately complex firework and the neuroanatomy that supports it. For his part, Koch would no doubt appreciate the computational trick that Gödel incompleteness plays on us, as well as the developmental aspect of consciousness that Hofstadter advocates.

Jim

Summer at the Krasnow Institute

I would have thought, based on previous years experiences, that the pace would have slowed down here but this time that’s not the case–at least so far. My graduate students are both hard at work on upcoming presentations, we’re in the process of welcoming new PI’s and taking delivery of our new space.

I’m very pleased about the first meeting of Mason’s Neuroscience Advisory Council this past week. The Council is the faculty body charged with coordinating the neuroscience curriculum across the University. It’s an exciting group with a tremendous amount of energy and the full support of the administration.

I’ll end this blog entry with some useful links:

Neuroscience at Mason
Social Complexity at Mason

Jim

Metabolic engineering: NY Times

Today’s New York Times has an article about a very interesting new company that is using metabolic engineering technology to cure Malaria and churn out petroleum replacement fuels.

Money quote:

Until recently, genetic engineering of the sort associated with traditional biotechnology has been limited to modifying a cell’s processes by inserting, mutating or deleting a single gene or a few significant genes. Genetic engineering has coaxed microorganisms like the common bacterium E. coli to produce drugs like human insulin, but has produced little else besides such protein drugs and a few antibiotics.

Mr. Keasling’s metabolic engineering is farther-reaching and, potentially, much more productive. His lab has invented techniques that rewrite the metabolisms of microorganisms. By modifying the structure of a microorganism’s proteins and adding genes from other organisms, Mr. Keasling has designed microbial factories that can produce a tremendous variety of drugs, biofuels and other chemicals.

A memory chip made out of neurons

Baruchi and Ben-Jacob report storing a set of engrams onto a set of neurons growing in a dish.

Money quote:

We show that using local chemical stimulations it is possible to imprint persisting (days) multiple memories (collective modes of neuron firing) in the activity of cultured neural networks. Microdroplets of inhibitory antagonist are injected at a location selected based on real-time analysis of the recorded activity. The neurons at the stimulated locations turn into a focus for initiating synchronized bursting events (the collective modes) each with its own specific spatiotemporal pattern of neuron firing.

Jim