I often get asked what it was like to grow up with neuroscience. As most of you know, my Dad, James Olds, was a neuroscientist who used electrophysiology to study reward systems and learning in the rat over a 22 year period between roughly 1954 to 1976. The biographic details are located in the link at the top.

Actually both my Mom and Dad were active in the field. My Mom, Marianne E. Olds, continues to publish, and my sister, Jacqueline Olds MD is a practicing psychiatrist in Cambridge Massachussets. So neuroscience was very much part of the family.

One of the most interesting aspects of having neuroscience in the family was at least listening to arguments about what the hippocampus actually does starting at a very young age–around the dinner table. I remember being perhaps in first grade when my parents took me into the lab and showed me the wonders of the Amon’s Horn stained with cressyl violet in a coronal section under a research microscope. Now I at least knew that they were arguing about a quite beautiful structure!

Another interesting part of growing up in neuroscience was meeting such luminaries as Sir John Eccles or E. Roy John long before I understood what they were famous for. And of course, it’s entertaining today to be see the gradual recognition among senior neuroscientists that I am indeed the ten year old they met with my parents in Moscow back in 1966.

We also got to see the use of computers in the neurophysiology laboratory from day one–my Dad had one of the first DEC PDP-8’s off the assembly line and he immediately put it to work (it was compact fridge size) doing real time single unit acquisition from freely behaving rats. Later, when he moved to Caltech and began to collaborate with colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (early 1970’s), the entire recording head stage became wireless and with multiple units being recorded simultaneously onto magentic tape, while the animal wandered around its environment.

What I remember most vividly though was my Dad teaching. This picture is of him teaching undergraduates at Caltech. You can see he really got into it! And without powerpoint!

Cheers,
Jim

The Krasnow great room is filled right now with distinguished faculty, students and guests of Center Director, Professor Claudio Cioffi-Revilla as we celebrate formally the commencement of a new Krasnow Center. I’ve written about this subject before, but let me reiterate: complex social systems are an emergent of human cognitive activities. As such, it is very clear that the study of how human interact in social networks is clearly within the larger domain of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study. We welcome Dr. Cioffi and his center to Krasnow–confident that the intellectual cross-pollination will prove extraordinarily fruitful.

Jim

Just a quick update. I had lunch with Meredith today and she’ll be posting a wrap-up on her blog real soon. The other good news is that she’s preparing a manuscript about this whole process for a scholarly journal in the architecture field.

Thanks from all of us Meredith!

Jim

I did a media interview this morning regarding the intelligent design controversy. Interestingly the conversation meandered somewhat away from the subject of evolution and the origin of life (and the universe) and more towards the question of academic freedom: who can say what within the academy and how the notion of free speech is actually somewhat different than being free to teach students to your religious point of view.

That is: my being free to stand in the Johnson Center with a protest sign is qualitatively different from my being free (as a professor) to teach intelligent design as part of the curriculum for say…a biochemistry course….as opposed to perhaps a senior elective in theology.

Furthermore, how is this fine line manifest in such gray areas as promotion and tenure decisions?

Interesting food for thought…

Jim

This is a really nice picture outside our cottage just after sunset. You’re looking west over Mill Pond towards Buzzard’s Bay and New Bedford. The cottage is across the street from the MBL Swope Conference Center. After Hurricane Bob in 1991, the entire street was flooded by the storm surge to a depth of perhaps 4 feet.

Most top research universities teach undergraduates. The teaching of undergraduates adds both an intellectual richness to the academy (teaching a subject matter from first principles forces one to think about one’s field in breadth and not simply in depth), but also provides an undeniable excitement as students ask questions that, while at first face naive, are also though provoking.

I am also of the opinion that neuroscience, as an undergraduate major, is the optimal way to commence neuroscience as a career. Let’s face it, given the overflow of data about the brain, the more years to cover it, the better.

Now one might question that: after all, isn’t there a danger in becoming a “jack-of-all-trades” and a master of none? I don’t think so, particularly when the enormous breadth of the field is taught at the undergraduate level. There is ample time, later, during the graduate years and in the post-doctoral training to specialize.

Finally, having a large cadre of undergraduates to teach provides a much needed first teaching opportunity for graduate students. And increasingly, academic jobs require evidence of teaching skills as well as demonstration of research ability.

Jim

In this blog entry, I’d like to link the vitality and health of the
existing neuroscience doctoral program (http://neuroscience.gmu.edu)
to the development of an undergraduate major in the same field.

Science doctoral programs, of course, are necessarily intertwined
with research activities. After all, the ultimate goal for a doctoral
student is to produce a dissertation based on research conducted
under the supervision of a thesis professor. Not surprisingly then,
the competitiveness of a doctoral program is then linked deeply to
the competitiveness of an institution’s corresponding research
program–this is as true for neuroscience as it is for more classical
fields such as physics or chemistry.

Thus, the health of a doctoral program depends, to a very large
degree, on the underlying health of the the program’s faculty
research activities. For those programs with a large, well-funded
cadre of internationally recognized researchers–even if in a
comparatively narrow area–that is where the best graduate students go.

Which brings me to back to the subject of undergraduate programs.
Ultimately, what is the major source of dollars that can used to
recruit top flight faculty? What is the backstop, that subserves the
promise of tenure? The answer of course is undergraduate tuition.
Those departments/programs that have a very solid base of
undergraduate students who are working towards a major in
neuroscience, are, as a result of that tuition support, able to
aggressively pursue and hire the best neuroscientists.

Hence the doctoral program and the research are ultimately dependent
upon a well-tended garden of undergraduate students all working
towards a bachelors of science degree in neuroscience.

Without such a garden, a doctoral program (and also a research unit)
is vulnerable to withering on the vine.

Jim

There has been some discussion about the possibility of creating a new
undergraduate major in neuroscience at Mason. The notion is for a
rigorous curriculum that emphasizes strength in mathematics, physics
and chemistry, while at the same time offering honors research
experiences, possibly in collaboration with laboratories at HHMI and/or
NIH. Ann Butler is currently chairing a committee of faculty to look
very carefully at this idea with the plan of eventually developing a
proposal for the new major.

In the next several blog entries, I’m going to attempt to make my own
case for why I think this is a good idea for the University and for
Krasnow. The aim is not to formally advocate for the new undergraduate
neuroscience major, but rather to open a window into my own
perspectives and thoughts on this issue with the hope that it will
inform future discussions.

I’m also writing these words, serving the last year of my three year
term, on the Society for Neuroscience’s Public Information Committee.
Over that term, I’ve developed an appreciation for the how the public
perceives neuroscience as a field and I think that perception is quite
important into how successful such a major might be, over the long
haul.

I should begin with a short discourse on my own Alma Matter, Amherst
College (www.amherst.edu). Amherst, a liberal arts college in western
Massachusetts created a neuroscience major quite early on, relative to
many other places. That program has been characterized by three
important threads: (1) rigorous quantitative background, (2) intense
student research experiences and (3) integration with a liberal arts
curricular tradition. Over the many summers, I’ve taken many
undergraduate students from Amherst’s neuroscience program into my own
laboratory at various places ranging from here at the Marine Biology
Laboratory in Woods Hole to NIH. All of those students demonstrated an
incredible knack for conducting sophisticated bench-top science and
more importantly for thinking about neuroscience in a critical
manner–something that is more consistent with an advanced graduate
student, rather than a college senior.

While my own years at Amherst pre-dated the establishment of the
neuroscience major (I majored in chemistry), these ideas of
quantitative background, research experiences and deep integration with
a liberal arts curriculum were all present and play an important role
in my own ideas of what such a major might look like at Mason.

Next time, I’ll talk about how such an undergraduate program might
complement our existing doctoral degree.

Jim

We all, at one time or another, find ourselves in collaborations with
colleagues (or teams of colleagues) at other institutions. Sometimes
this can get tricky, especially with regards to sensitive issues such
as authorship or access to data. Having been through a number of these
often very fruitful experiences myself, I have the following advice to
offer: make certain to get as much agreed to in advance (and preferably
on paper or by email) before you commence the collaboration. There is
absolutely nothing wrong with putting the question of, for example, who
will be the corresponding author right out on the table in your initial
discussions with the potential collaborator. While this is true even
within Mason, it’s even more important for collaborations outside the
university. That’s because, if things do go awry (and you can be
certain that they occasionally do), it’s very difficult for the
leadership of Mason to intervene in the internal affairs of another
institution on your behalf.

Have I made collaborations sound somewhat onerous? I hope not. In fact,
it is these type of collaborative research programs which build careers
and at the same time build our Institute. They are incredibly important
and useful.

So go forward and be fruitful!

Jim