Dana Foundation Blog

Dana Newsletter: May

Below is the latest Dana email newsletter. You can sign up to receive this (and other Dana email alerts and/or print publications) by going here.

Sound the Alarm: Fraud in Neuroscience

by Stephen G. Lisberger, Ph.D.

By all accounts, scientific misconduct over the last decade is on the rise, especially in the area of journal retractions. In neuroscience, our author -- both a leading academic and an experienced neuroscience journal editor -- believes the field is detecting "only the tip of the fraud iceberg." His story addresses the nature, detection, and incentives for fraud, and suggests reforms. From Cerebrum, our online magazine of ideas.

Are Genetics the Key to Solving Brain Disorders?

A Dana Foundation-sponsored lecture by Maria Karayiorgou, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University’s Mind Brain Behavior Institute, was a mind boggling, roller coaster ride on the track where neuroscience is pinning much of its hopes: genetics.

Karayiorgou’s lecture was a bit like a trip down Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole: the more she and her colleagues uncover, it seems, the further away they are from definitive answers. One reason: The average adult human brain has 80 billion neurons; each neuron has multiple connections. Those connections may number in the trillions, or even quadrillions. Meanwhile, of the 20,000 genes recently discovered in the Human Genome Project, 80 percent relate to the brain.

The Law to Neuroscience: Hold Up

If you were unable to attend the Neuroscience and Law event in D.C. in April, you can now watch it in its entirety by viewing the webcast on the Dana Foundation website. Focusing on the use of neuroscience research in the courtroom, the event was part of the Neuroscience & Society series sponsored by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Dana Foundation.

Featured panelists included Dana Alliance and Dana Foundation Board member Steve Hyman, director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Owen Jones, director of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience and a law professor at Vanderbilt University; and Honorable Barbara Rothstein, U.S. District Judge from the Western District of Washington state.

Report on Progress: Vision

In the May edition of the Report on Progress, “Artificial Sight: Restoration of Sight through Use of Argus II, a Bioelectronic Retinal Implant,” Mark S. Humayun, M.D., Ph.D., discusses restoring sight to blind patients through a retinal implant:

More than 1 million Americans are legally blind and another 10% cannot detect light. With increased mean lifespan, the frequency of age-related eye disease will double in the next 30 years. A significant percentage of the non-treatable blindness stems from loss of photoreceptors (the rods and cones). Once photoreceptors are lost, restoring useful vision to blind patients has been impossible. However, after nearly a century of research into the use of electrical stimulation to restore sight, the Argus II system (Second Sight Medical Products, Inc. Sylmar, CA) was just approved by the FDA as the first medical implant to restore sight to patients who are blind from near total loss of their photoreceptors.

Spoiler Alert: Don't Worry

I recently finished watching the television series Friday Night Lights, which originally aired from 2006-2011. It is a great show, one definitely worth watching, but I’m not here to make recommendations. Instead, I’ll reassure anyone who has had key plot elements of a show, movie, or book “spoiled” by someone else: It doesn’t matter. (By the way, in case you’re hesitant to read further for fear of spoilers, none are provided here.)

I was given the entire series of Friday Night Lights as a DVD box set, complete with photos from the show. Whoever put this together didn’t think it through. When flipping to the second disc in Season One, for example, there was a picture that showed a character who hadn’t yet been introduced. A few discs later, I spotted a key character in a new setting. I quickly learned to grab the discs without looking at the images, but even that didn’t solve my “problems.” Once the disc loaded, some of the episode titles were obvious giveaways as to what would happen.