Biddy Martin comes to Amherst

My Alma Mater has successfully raided the University of Wisconsin’s flagship Madison campus to recruit its new President. The Chronicle’s link is here.

The connection between Madison and Amherst is not without precedent. Alexander Meiklejohn was President of Amherst College from 1913-1923, from which he decamped for Madison to start an experimental college at the University of Wisconsin. His successor at Amherst, was my great grandfather, George D. Olds.

Congratulations to Amherst College on a great recruitment.

Solar Power close to economic feasability?

At today’s Financial Times here. My colleague Tyler Cowen isn’t convinced and brings up a mismatch with another of today’s headlines at Marginal Revolution.

My sense is that over the long haul, solar power is the big Kahuna of renewables. But the key technological advance may be some ways in the future–if we can capture solar flux directly in space and the packetize it for delivery here on Earth.

In the meantime, the existing solar capture technologies are all intriguing, from artificial photosynthesis to better photovoltaics.

Gina Kolata’s interview with three top women scientists at NYT

The interview is here. Includes Joy Hirsch, fellow neuroscientist at Columbia University.

Money quote from Hirsch:

When I was at Yale, I was the chairman of the Status of Women Committee for a long period of time. During that time Yale as an institution had a major commitment to raise the visibility and the numbers of women, and we did exactly as you described without a compromise at all in quality. It is not that we just teach our women to be self-promoting and to be excellent. We must also, I think, take the responsibility of teaching our institutions to be receptive and proactive and even aggressive in this manner.

Michael Crow et al. want to restructure NIH

The link is here. The idea has been floated many times before and I’ve vacillated on my own view as I’ve spent more years as an academic. The most recent vision for this type of change to the nation’s proverbial “jewel in the crown” came from Harold Varmus. Quoting from the article:

Harold Varmus, a former NIH director, was among the first to raise an alarm over the continually proliferating institutes — a process he described, in a 2001 article in the journal Science, as one of “fusion and fission.” While the NIH is seen as “the jewel in the crown of the federal government,” Varmus wrote, adding too many facets creates “a superficial sparkle that may be pleasing to the few but threatening to the functional integrity of the overall design.

 I was at NIH as a postdoctoral fellow during the beginning of the Varmus years and the lesson I took away was that, over the long haul, there’s an awful lot of inertia that keeps NIH on a relatively constant course, no matter the zeal of the leadership. I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing. One of the really wonderful things about NIH is that it works. In contrast to many other agencies and entities across the globe. Why do radical surgery an a  healthy patient?

Thinking back further, I remember an older contrasting vision that mostly came from the extramural community in the late 80’s: to privatize NIH. Now that, in my opinion, would have been a disaster.

Sue Halpern’s book review/essay on mind and the internet

It’s here. May be behind a firewall for some of our readers. The three books reviewed are:

World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet
by Michael Chorost                                                  
Free Press, 242 pp., $26.00
The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You
by Eli Pariser                                                  
Penguin, 294 pp., $25.95
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
by Jaron Lanier                                                  
Vintage, 240 pp., $15.00 (paper)

I haven’t read any of these yet, but probably will. In any case, Halpern’s review is really excellent, both for its neuroscientific sophistication and for its healthy skepticism about the future of the brain-machine interface.

More on Patrick Kennedy’s Moon Shot Idea

First, I think this dovetails nicely with the entire Decade of the Mind Project as it was conceived at Krasnow, back in 2007. Congressman Kennedy was a tireless champion of neuroscience while he served in the House of Representatives and on the occasions that I met with him, I was incredibly impressed with his enthusiasm and integrity on this issue among many others.

Second, I worry that frankly, where the United States is politically right now, the notion of another US “owned” Moon Shot is not in the cards. Congress seems entirely deadlocked over the structure of the US budget on virtually every substantive component: revenue, entitlements, and discretionary spending. That ideological gridlock seems to be mirrored, both in the media and in the polity itself. At the same time, in my conversations with economists, the issue of the debt limit and its ramifications in terms of sovereign default are both unclear and potentially very consequential.

All of this, at a time when the US science R&D budgets are under incredible stress.

Much as I have been a champion of something like Decade of the Mind myself, I find myself increasingly engaged in the more proximal fight to both preserve and protect America’s on-going investments in science and education.

Any real progress towards a “Moon Shot” in the neurosciences will necessarily have to be international in nature. This is also true of large-scale physics projects such as the Large Hadron Collider as it is true of the International Space Station.

I would also argue, that the globalized private sector has a very important role to play–as it is now beginning to play in Space commercialization and exploration.

I’m impressed then with the notion of making mankind’s most significant scientific quests, universal–not the property of any one nation state, but rather the product of collective human endeavor.