Imagining imaging and supporting science

It’s a flawless Spring weekend here in Washington. I am sitting back in my living room thinking about two seemingly unrelated problems: what will be the next major advance in non-invasive human functional brain imaging and how to support academic science in an era of austerity.

The current gold standard in brain imaging, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has taken a remarkable number of hits recently, although most are related to analysis of the data and experimental design (For a good summary see Sleim and Roiser here). As importantly, what is measured, the BOLD signal, may correlate with synaptic activity in brain, but it’s most certainly physiologically removed–blood oxygen demand is, in fMRI,  a bio-proxy for chemical neurotransmission.

So the question is then, what comes next? What technology will replace BOLD and permit a more refined imaging of human brain function; one that matches the neural code better in both spatial and temporal resolution (for those excited by DT tractography, I would only point out that the wiring diagam is not dynamic like the active brain).

What comes next is very important to me because as an institute director, I invest scarce resources in the sort of expensive shared scientific infrastructure that comes with being able to non-invasively image human brain function. The trick is to avoid owning an expensive white elephant.

Which brings me to thoughts of money–where will the money come from to support American science if the academic-government social partnership of the last sixty years comes to an end (See Bush’s Science the Endless Frontier here)? One possibility is that progress in American science will come to a halt as it did in Russia for a while after the fall of the Soviet Union. Another possibility is that the political debate over this country’s financial difficulties will miraculously mature with the subsequent result of stable governmental support for scientific R&D continuing.

However, it also quite possible that in the current poisoned domestic political climate, science funding will fall off a cliff and that is a real worry. This worry is magnified by a recent paper (PDF) in the American Sociological Review by UNC’s Gordon Gauchat which analyzed trends in public trust of scientists. His results show a disturbing erosion of that trust among political conservatives. If the public doesn’t trust scientists, then it’s not a real stretch to see how congressional support for science R&D might be seriously damaged.

Which brings me to another possibility. Some multinational companies, such as Apple (see the Guardian piece here) are sitting on a huge amount of cash. Might there be a way to put that cash to work to increase public knowledge while at the same time increasing private return on investment?

Or to put it another way, might there be a new partnership in the works? One between academia and private enterprise? Such a partnership (on a large-scale) might truly energize the global economy and promote the sort of global positive outcomes which, until recent sovereign downgrades, had been the provence of governments, multilateral organizations and their coterie of NGO’s.

Tyler Cowen’s vision of a new American Century?

His 4000 word essay in American Interest is here. It’s a pretty positive vision of an american future that would be export-based. Shale gas, MITx courses and robotics all play important roles…along with maturing developing countries that develop a real taste for what we make best. I worry that he doesn’t factor in externals such as climate change, food production ceilings and the propensity for our primate brains to get the best of us. But it’s an important piece and it helps counter the declinist conventional wisdom.

A dark view of America’s future…

Here in FT’s magazine, by Edward Luce. At one level, it’s overly simplistic because Luce is trying to make a point–namely that the US is in decline across multiple dimensions. The truth is, and to be fair Luce acknowledges this point, this country remains a leader in many areas. But the piece makes many excellent points, particularly with regards to the political paralysis that I’ve blogged about recently.

But America has been at such a point before (think 1861 or 1968). Historically, it has shown an ability to renew itself at many decisive points and frankly the society is too complex to forecast any particular outcome with any degree of certainty.

In my own travels I have been impressed with how much innovation and creativity remains here in America. And further, the increasing productivity of humans may not be zero sum.

Hope for Congress?

About 10 miles away, over the rainbow, is the Capitol Building. Perhaps they will overcome their differences in the near future and relearn the art of compromise?

In all seriousness, political failure is now a real part of the calculus for assessing systemic risk here in the US. My own sense is that, after the general election, enough progress will be made on the country’s economic trajectory to keep the recovery going–but nothing is certain and the two sides are playing very much of a zero-sum game.

Personalized medicine "omics" approaches hit a speedbump

ScienceInsider has the story here. Money quote:

One major problem, the report says, is “overfitting”: Because the studies often look for patterns in hundreds of biomolecules using a relatively small number of patient samples, it is easy to find correlations that do not reflect the biology of patients’ disease. The report recommends a set of steps to validate the tests, such as repeating the test on blinded samples from a different institution. Journals and funders should also require that data and models from papers be made freely available so that other researchers can check the results.

On the danger of being oversold: NeuroX

I’ll simply note this morning that today’s NYT op-ed piece on interpersonal neuroscience is the latest case of the NeuroX fad–applying a neuroscience framework to any and all social issues. This sort of journalistic conceit is becoming noxious I think–neuroscience as a field is still young, lacks a full theoretical underpinning and is simply not ready to be the explainer-in-chief for all human/animal social phenomena.

The last time a nascent discipline got over-exposed like this was I think the overselling of Artificial Intelligence. It wasn’t good at all for that field.