The next installment of the Nature Network Neuroscience group journal club is now live. The paper discusses a potential therapeutic strategy involving the upregulation of the dopamine receptor D2R that may be beneficial in the treatment of cocaine abuse and addiction.
The contributor discussing this paper for the neuroscience group is Áine Duffy, a postdoctoral fellow at Weill-Cornell Medical College in New York. I want to thank Áine for her participation.
Our May editorial takes a brief look back at some of the history of Nature Neuroscience. We also present some of the most-cited papers over the past decade. This is an interesting exercise, as it provides an opportunity to reflect on the interests of both the authors and readers over the past decade.
The next installment of the Nature Network Neuroscience group journal club is now live. The paper provides evidence that in unanesthetized animals, sounds are sparsely represented in the auditory cortex.
The contributor discussing this paper for the neuroscience group is Lizzie Buchen, a science writer for Discover Magazine in New York. I want to thank Lizzie for her participation.
I recently attended the Alzheimer’s Disease Keystone meeting in Keystone, CO and became more acutely aware of something than ever before: academia and drug companies really like one another. Sure, the latter always loved the former, since collaborating with university-based scientists often made the publications arising from the private sector look a little more legit. On the contrary, the reciprocity in this relationship has not always been there. There is without a doubt some sub-disciplinary differences in this complex relationship, but in the basic science departments that I lurked around, if you were associated with a company (or worse, left academia for a position there, succumbing to the power of the Dark Side), there was always talk of whether or not you could be trusted. Because companies need publications to prove the legitimacy of their product, right? And the legitimacy determines how much money everyone makes, right? So with such conflicts of interest, could the scientist, or the data being produced by these people, be trusted?
The next installment of the Nature Network Neuroscience group journal club is now live. The paper discusses the role for brief adaptation in the improvement of population-based encoding accuracy during sensory information processing.
The contributor discussing this paper for the neuroscience group is Adam Packer, a graduate student at Columbia University in the lab of Rafa Yuste. I want to thank Adam for his participation.
I would say no. Grant proposals are a precious commodity, especially in this day and age of reduced funding and evaporating money. However, in a recent Nature correspondence, Dr. Noam Harel describes his vision for a centralized grant repository, ideally open to the public, where researchers could place their best ideas, allowing various funding agencies to discover the plans most-suited to their respective agendas. Dr. Harel likens this potential web manifestation to something like eBay, Facebook or Google, but for scientists and funding agencies. A more apt analogy might be Monster.com, with both sides searching for their ideal match, and a long-term relationship (perhaps I am now making it sound more like eHarmony.com…).
When it comes to the integration of scientific communication and technology, I am extremely optimistic, and although I don’t reject Dr. Harel’s idea entirely, I just don’t see it taking off in its presently-proposed form.