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.
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.
During last Saturday's Staying Sharp session, we covered the event live using Storify, a program that allows users to pull information from all over the internet—Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.—and assemble it in one place. You can find Dana's Storify post from Staying Sharp here: http://storify.com/dana_fdn/staying-sharp-mount-vernon.
As you can see, the Storify post includes many tweets and photos, listed chronologically, and allows readers to follow the event as if they were there. Towards the end, you can find the panelists' "one important nugget" they shared with the audience.
We will be using Storify again at the next Staying Sharp event in Las Vegas in a few weeks. Stay tuned!
Tune in
tonight to the free webcast, “Raising Drug-Free Kids: How Can the Science of Addiction Help Us?” to
hear Dana Alliance member and Director of the
National Institute on Drug Abuse Nora
Volkow, M.D., discuss how drug addiction impacts our youth and the importance of
prevention.
This webcast
is part of the Child Mind Institute’s Speak Up for Kids series, and will run
from 8-9pm EST. Register here.
For more
information on youth addiction, visit NIDA for Teens.
If you'll be in Westchester County, NY, this weekend, please join us on Saturday, May 4 for a free Staying Sharp forum. The program includes a panel discussion from 9 am to 11 am with DABI member Patrick A. Griffth, M.D., FAAN, from Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, and three other neuroscientists: Desiree Byrd, Ph.D, from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Christopher Edwards, Ph.D., from Duke University Medical Center in Durham, NC and last but not least, André A. Fenton, Ph.D., from New York University Center for Neural Science. They will be discussing the latest information on the aging brain, memory, Alzheimer’s disease, brain health and more, with a particular focus on issues that affect the African American and black communities. For the last 30 minutes the experts will take questions from the audience.
This will all be happening at the Grace Baptist Church at 52 South Sixth Avenue in Mount Vernon. Reservations are highly recommended as space is limited and these forums fill up fast. To reserve your spot register now by calling 1-8777-926-8300. For more information go to www.dana.org/stayingsharp or email stayingsharp@dana.org. We hope to see you on Saturday!
