Pickering Creek: A worthy cause….

We helped celebrate the 30th birthday of a wonderful Eastern Shore cause, Pickering Creek, a sanctuary of Chesapeake Audubon Society with over 400 acres of forests, fields, and shoreline. The sanctuary provides wonderful educational opportunities for k-12 students from across the area.

But the house in the foreground is not Pickering Creek! It’s Lombardy Estate, not too far away, but  really one of the eastern shore’s gems. The birthday party was under the large tent, by the water on a day where the weather was absolutely perfect.

I’ll have a little biology with my scifi…

Zen Faulkes’ very entertaining commentary on the biology embedded in the new SciFi movie, Prometheus is here (hat tip to Andrew Sullivan). I also agree with him generally. Although I’d add this: another “watermark” for relatedness would be at the phenotype level: it would be very interesting if alien brains had neurons that conducted action potentials based on ionic conductances.

Neuroscience in China

Nature Magazine has an excellent report here. US National Academy of Science member Moo Ming Poo is leading the way at ION in Shanghai.

Money quote from Poo:

“It’s more exciting, exhilarating here [than in the US],” he says. “They need me. I feel it’s the best use of my life.”

Bethesda Maryland…

I’m headed for a meeting in Bethesda this afternoon. As many readers know, I was a postdoc at the NIH after I graduated with my PhD from Michigan in 1987. I also lived there for six years at a time before 9/11 when the campus of NIH will still wide-open, more like a college than the federal installation that it is.

NIH (and here I’m referring to the intramural program that has a campus in Bethesda) has faced many challenges over the years and has managed to thrive in spite. It’s a place that structurally facilitates the sort of high-risk, high-payoff research made possible by freeing investigators from the need to constantly be writing new grant applications.

When I was there, the real limit on my research was my own imagination– in stark contrast to the challenges that young investigators often face in the academy.

All of this may soon be at real risk as the US faces the so called “fiscal cliff” next January. The biomedical research at NIH is one of the few government programs that has maintained real bipartisan support over the years since the World War II. The reason is of course, that NIH makes a real difference in the everyday lives of Americans and…that it just plain works.

Yglesias and the debt ceiling debate

He thinks it was a serious blow to the recovery, here. And doing it all over would be a bad thing. Hat tip to Tyler Cowen.

My own sense is that any signal US political structural dysfunction scares the global economy. And the debt ceiling debate was as clear a signal as one might imagine. The key is that when the world’s only remaining superpower shows sign of instability, risk takers run to the sidelines.