I am torn between two potential syllabi for my Fall graduate course, Neuroscience Methods. The course has been taught in the past as essentially a grantsmanship class with a heavy dose of critical scientific thinking along with experimental design.

The other idea is to actually present a survey of extant neuroscience methods, with the notion that, these days, in order to be a truly successful investigator, one needs to at least be able to understand how disparate methods can be deployed to test hypotheses. So in this case, the syllabus would be focused on techniques.

I’d value feedback from our students (and others) on which might be more valuable.

Jim

A colleague of mine and I had lunch today at an Indian restaurant in Fairfax. We are thinking of writing a book together and the discussion was going back and forth over the different threads that we might include (more on that at some other time). By the by, I was complimented over my time management. I guess the idea was that it must be difficult for an institute director to contemplate writing a book while running a science enterprise at the same time. Must be the time management skills. After thinking for a moment I responded that the only possible way I was able to manage my time at all is having a superb support staff (both here at George Mason and in Woods Hole).

One trick to time management in senior positions is getting comfortable with the power of a scheduler. You give up some of your autonomy (the ability to set your own calendar) in return for the coordination and flexibility that comes from having one central node where all the competing time commitments can be dealt with. The advent of reliable (and free) on-line calendaring systems and then the ability to push that calendar information to mobile devices has also helped make the system work for us.

Jim

You know neuroscience has become a central societal meme when Slate Magazine devotes a special issue to it.

Jim

An impressive paper by Couey et al. in Neuron demonstrates how central nicotinic receptors act to down regulate neocortical spike time dependent plasticity (click on the link above).

Now, imagine neocortical acetylcholine tone reduced as a result of cell loss in the basal forebrain early in Alzheimer’s Disease. The result would be apparently greater potentiation at cortical SDTP glutamatergic synapses. Kind of counter-intuitive, no?

Jim

I’m pleased to report that two new PI’s will be joining Krasnow in the Fall: Ted Dumas (from University of Oregon) and Rob Cressman (from Penn State). As with previous years they will be invited to be “guest bloggers” so that our readers can learn about their research. In the meantime, we welcome them and look forward to an enriched Krasnow scientific community.

Jim

I spent yesterday on Capitol Hill mostly on behalf of the Society for Neuroscience. It’s finally warming up in Washington and so the flowers and trees were in full bloom. The message to our legislators was to support biomedical research, particularly through a 6.7% increase in the NIH budget. That’s the amount that will simply allow the NIH to maintain its “science purchasing” power against the biomedical inflation index (which is much higher typically than the economy’s inflation).

I also got to remind staffers about he upcoming Decade of the Mind symposium here at George Mason. There is a lot of excitement building for that event.

Jim

Here’s an interesting finding: Miller and Sweatt have demonstrated that DNA methylation (essentially dynamic covalent modifications of genes) plays a crucial role in hippocampal fear conditioning. It’s published in NEURON. I linked to the Faculty of 1000 citation for those who don’t have access to the journal.

The significance is that the genome itself can be modified and essentially serve as an engram. This is a really old idea, but this new wrinkle gives the notion new life.

Jim

RIM’s blackberry servers have been down since last evening. This is the service that kept going during 9/11 and that much of the federal government uses. I have a blackberry also. Makes me wonder how much to count on it in the future. Of course, it’s kind of nice to give my thumbs a rest.

One of the real challenges for the Institute going forward is to leverage our current imaging technologies for scientific discovery while at the same time, taking the calculated risks on what the next significant technologies will be for the field.

In the area of simple system models (like Alpysia or Drosophila), one of the huge challenges has been to create a functional map of the entire nervous system. Here is one approach that I think might be fruitful. I’ve always been interested in the aequoerin as a calcium reporter because it signals with a photon in the visual spectrum at very high temporal resolution. It always seemed like it might be an ideal way to look at the activation of protein kinase C (which typically needs Ca2+ for activation) at high levels of temporal resolution within living cells.

Jim