So I edit a marine biology journal. And I spend time every summer at
a marine biological laboratory–how does that square with leading an
institute that focuses on cognition? The answer to that question is
actually not as much of a stretch as one might think. Marine models
have been crucial for progress in neurobiology since mid-20th
century. The squid giant axon was the model for understanding the
basis of the action potential. The crustacean stomatogastric ganglion
has been a crucial for understanding the rules that allow for
compensation in neuronal networks. The sea slugs, Aplysia californica
and Hermissenda crassicornis, have helped us to get a handle on the
biophysics and molecular biology that underlie learning and memory.

Ultimately this type of research is based on the reasonable
assumption that the most important building blocks of neuronal
function have been conserved across phylogeny and the realization
that simple systems (such a slugs with brains that have 10,000
neurons instead of 100 billion) are often more amenable to
experimentation.

For me, this world of science first came alive in the late 1970’s
when I learned how to make intracellular recordings from the
photoreceptors of Hermissenda at Woods Hole. Observing the living
light response of a single cell was enough to pull me into a life of
science. At the same time, it introduced me into the world of
molecular signal transduction as I learned about a small, but very
important molecule called cyclic adenosine monophosphate.

But marine biology is a whole lot larger of a field than the
neurobiology that I’ve been writing about. Marine models are critical
for our understanding of such critical cellular processes as
fertilization, cell-cell recognition and mitosis. The molecular
motors that cells use to move needed components around were
discovered at Woods Hole (and a Nobel Prize awarded in consequence).
Lately the incredible species diversity of the Earth’s oceans–
something we knew very little about–was uncovered by the use of
genomics methodologies–also at Woods Hole.

I vividly recall my first graduate course: a semester’s introduction to
invertebrate zoology at Woods Hole in the Fall of 1978. It was during
that course that I learned (and experimented with) the very primitive
innate immune system of the sponge, Microciona prolifera. We would go
out and collect our experimental material from the local coastline
and then stay up late at night measuring the diameter of small sponge
colonies in different kinds of artificial sea water. That was very
different from working on Hermissenda’s neurons, but also enough to
direct me into a life of science.

Jim

Yesterday the Institute put on its fourth annual welcome lunch for
the incoming doctoral students in neuroscience. It was really
gratifying to see all of the new faces (and old) and especially to
see how nicely the program has grown over the years. We all ate
Domino’s Pizza and sipped soft drinks in the Krasnow Great Room. It’s
still too hot to picnic outside.

Jim

Scientific administrators have to fundraise. This hasn’t always been
true–at least not true in the sense that it is today. Thirty years
ago, it was enough for an institute director to hire the right
people, knowing that they would succeed in writing the right grants
which would drive the machine forward: perpetual motion.

The fact is that grant awards alone can’t drive an institute–for a
whole slew of reasons ranging from timing of awards to restrictions
on what grants will actually support.

Hence, the need for administrators to persuade donors (individuals
and foundations) to provide the resources needed to “mind the gaps”.

Ultimately this sort of fundraising requires both the building of a
trust relationship with the donor, but also an implicit argument for
the gift, that is based upon a simple proposition: both the needs of
the donor and the institute will be satisfied. Notice that I put the
needs of the donor first. That is because ultimately the gift (or
award) is a voluntary choice of the donor. In general individuals
(and foundations) only make such voluntary choices when their needs
(which can be all over the map) are met.

There are two other factors at work here: the first has to do with
science credibility above and beyond the existence of a trusting
relationship. Science credibility is measurable by many metrics
(publications, awards, other grant awards etc. ) and in general
donors require some external validation of any argument for a gift.
The second factor has to do with the recognition that ideally, the
needs of the donor become identified closely with the needs of the
institute. This latter takes time.

So time–the time to build that mapping between the needs of the
donor and the institute (we call that relationship cultivation) is
very important. Great fundraising programs aren’t built overnight.

Part of that cultivation process is the making of a case–the case
that the science is both excellent and of use (if not directly for
the donor, that definitely for humanity writ large). The scientific
administrator must communicate his or her passion for the science–
which as far as I can tell can’t be faked. And that only can happen
with superb science.

Thus: a chicken and egg problem.

Which is solved early on in an institute’s life either by seed money
or support from a founding entity such as a university.

Jim

Although classes don’t begin until Friday, the giant is awakening from its slumber. Students are beginning to move in, the campus is looking immaculate.

I am at the moment deeply involved in a number of academic searches–this is the beginning of the high season for that academic activity also. In the next several blog entries, I’ll write about the process–how it is typically implemented, and how I think it can be made more effective.

Later in the semester I’ll spend some time discussing fundraising–which is an increasingly important activity for scientific administrators.

Jim

In this week’s SCIENCE, Rakic reviews a recent paper in PNAS (R. D. Bhardwaj et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 103, 12564 (2006). [PNAS]) which uses 14C to study the question of adult neurogenesis. Bottom-line is negative.

Money quote
” The innovative study by Bhardwaj et al. demonstrates with advanced methodology–¹⁴C dating of cell births–that no new neurons are added to the human neocortex after birth. The authors take advantage of a transiently sharp increase in the level of the radioactive carbon isotope, ¹⁴C, in Earth’s atmosphere during the era of aboveground testing of nuclear weapons between the mid-1950s and the time of the nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. In the years following these events, the level of ¹⁴C in the atmosphere declined to preexisting low background levels. The authors acquired cortical tissue from the autopsies of seven individuals born in Sweden between 1933 and 1973, and examined the level of ¹⁴C in individual cells by accelerator mass spectrometry. The presence of ¹⁴C in genomic DNA indicates that cells passed through their last cell division at a time when the atmospheric level of this isotope was high.”

I was at lunch in Washington yesterday and my guest (from the policy world) brought up a very interesting point: namely the problem inherent in the request from a policy-maker to an analyst (or a senior professor to a graduate student) to confirm a finding by conducting some other observation.

Of course, from the scientific standpoint, we really should be asking the graduate student to attempt to disprove the finding, right? That is they should be attempting to experimentally falsify the hypothesis/theory/conventional wisdom.

Now think about the last figure in so very many papers–the cartoon diagram for how it is speculated that “everything works” in vivo. The picture I call the Just So Story after Kipling. How many times are we in danger of asking our trainees to confirm the Just So Story instead of falsifying it? How are our rewards structures set up in science vis a vis this problem?

Jim

Lots of issues with the new blogger beta this morning. Hopefully these will be resolved shortly.

In the meantime I thought I would take this time out to thank Jim Rutt of the Krasnow Advisory Board for his very generous new gift to the Institute–following on to his very substantial support in the past. It’s private sector support like Jim’s which has allowed the Krasnow Institute to take risks in how we approach science. When I think back over my own years as institute director, I can think of no more important source of support that our individual leadership donors.

Thank you again Jim Rutt and thanks to all who have helped the Institute grow to what it has become today.

Neuroscience explanations for couch potato-ism.

Really interesting article in today’s SCIENCE magazine (click on the link above) by Kearns et al.

Money quote from the abstract:
“We studied networks of human subjects attempting to solve the graph or network coloring problem, which models settings in which it is desirable to distinguish one’s behavior from that of one’s network neighbors. Networks generated by preferential attachment made solving the coloring problem more difficult than did networks based on cyclical structures, and “small worlds” networks were easier still. We also showed that providing more information can have opposite effects on performance, depending on network structure.”

Jim

I will be joining GMU as an Assistant Professor in the Dept of Psychology and as a PI in NICKI at the Krasnow Institute of Advanced Studies. My research is concerned with understanding the mechanisms used by the human brain that allow us to recognize the movements of other people, such as how they walk or move their face or hands. Most of us would have had the experience of recognizing someone familiar to us purely on the basis of the way they walk – even if we can’t see their face. Accurately perceiving the movements of others is important for things as basic as navigating your way in a crowded street, to more complex situations such as recognizing friends from a distance, identifying threats from others, or picking up on the subtle, nonverbal cues that signal attraction.

Recognizing the movements of others is something that we do with ease, yet this type of motion is complex, has many degrees of freedom and thus poses a significant perceptual problem. My work is centered on how we solve this perceptual problem. Recently I have begun working on the idea that we use information about the configuration of the human body in order to place constraints on how we expect it might move – for example, we know that the upper arm must remain connected to the shoulder, and this limits its range of motion. It turns out that an area in the brain known to be critical for recognizing human movement, called the superior temporal sulcus (STS), uses this kind of body-shape information. This is a relatively simple idea that is borrowed from computer vision approaches to recognizing human movement, but gives us some clues to the way the human brain processes this complex motion. It also shows how ideas from computer vision can inform the understanding of human vision, and vice versa, something I plan to pursue further…

To investigate these issues I use a number of brain imaging methods, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). fMRI measures changes to a magnetic field due to increases or decreases in blood oxygenation that are coupled to neuronal firing, and thus fMRI provides a way of non-invasively measuring brain function at high (2-5mm) spatial resolution. EEG is a measure of brain electrical activity recorded from the scalp, and gives millisecond accuracy of the timing of neural events.

I was born in Melbourne, Australia and completed my PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Brain Sciences Institute at Swinburne University in Melbourne, focusing on the neurochemical basis of attention and short-term memory in humans. Following this I completed a post-doc at the Center for Advanced Imaging in the Department of Radiology at West Virginia University in Morgantown, WV. Here I conducted a number studies using fMRI and EEG to examine the neural basis of the recognition of human movement, as well as learning a number of methodological issues associated with MRI. My research focus here was on how we visually represent the movement of different body parts, such as faces, arms, and legs. This work showed that when we see the movements of other people we activate our own motor representations in a manner consistent with the body part we see moving – that is, seeing another’s hand move activates representations of our own hand movements. This is another idea I will pursue in my research endeavors.

It is an exciting time to be starting a lab at GMU and at the Krasnow especially. It is my goal to set up a research program that is multidisciplinary, integrating knowledge about human vision, neuroscience, and computer vision and modeling to understand how we see others and interact with them.