Rita Levi-Montalcini has died. Her NYT obit is here. She was a neuroscientist Nobel laureate whose discovery of Nerve Growth Factor helped shape the way we think about wiring up the nervous system during development. I had the honor of hearing her speak at the 1981 Society for Neuroscience meeting in Los Angeles–we graduate students were packed into the nose-bleed seats of the giant auditorium, but we hung on every word…
She will be missed.
What I wrote in July still stands:
None of this is good for NIH or NSF. Because the fiscal cliff cuts are across the board, they are mindless (remember, the cliff was supposed to be a deterrent) so the excellent will get thrown out with the merely good.
Even, if by some miracle, Congress manages to get something to the President’s desk in time, my guess is it’ll be some sort of agreement on the revenue side (i.e. taxes) that punts on the spending cuts. And I’m not exactly optimistic about any agreement before new years.
Expect some legislative movement encouraged by the markets early in the new year–it’ll be very telling to see if Speaker Boehner has any difficulty being reelected by his caucus–once again probably on the tax side but probably also dealing with DOD. I’m not expecting much good news for science.
Of course he was the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Mathew Rees’ perspective on how the concept of paradigm shift has fared is here, in The New Atlantis.
My own view is that neuroscience is in need of a paradigm, never mind the shift. We’re still largely data collectors as far as the big questions of how mind arises from brain activity.
It’s Christmas Day here in Washington. After an early morning fog, it’s fairly balmy outside–the perfect weather for a nice long walk through the woods.
In the meantime, consider the trials of Chicago’s wonderful Field Museum here. This story is being repeated at other institutions across the US, it’s not pretty and it doesn’t bode well for American competitiveness.
Hat tip Tyler Cowen, the link is here. It’s being published by Springer, and…it will be free for students in developing countries. Pfaff is a giant in the field, this is a worthy contribution.
It’s all here. Bottom line: the Chinese space program is pretty impressive having just pulled up a close encounter with a potential EOTWAWKI asteroid.
It’s here. The N is very small, but it’s an intriguing result. The PI’s believe that obesity is a function of gut bacterial ecology–what they call an infection.
It’s here on Forbes.com.
Austin Hughes’ superb long piece in The New Atlantis, here.
Money quote:
Of all the fads and foibles in the long history of human credulity, scientism in all its varied guises — from fanciful cosmology to evolutionary epistemology and ethics — seems among the more dangerous, both because it pretends to be something very different from what it really is and because it has been accorded widespread and uncritical adherence.
Do read it all. It’s incredibly important.
I’ve spent the last couple of days at an E-Science institute joining some of our university’s research librarians and meeting w. colleagues at places ranging from Harvard to UC Merced. I was excited to learn about how places like George Mason are moving rapidly towards providing comprehensive data-management solutions to PI’s in a way that both supports the requirements of funding agencies, but also allows for the reuse and sharing of data in new and innovative ways (like we do here at Krasnow, check out here).
I also learned about something called the Data Management Plan Tool (or DMP Tool) which can greatly facilitate developing these types of plans for grant applications to a variety of funding agencies (check that out here).
Finally, it was a lot of fun to do something entirely different from what I started off the week doing at NSF (see my earlier post on NBIC2). One of the best things about my job is learning about many different things. I still can’t get over how lucky I am…
Discoverers and Discoveries 