Nominations open Monday for the first Kavli prizes in neuroscience, astrophysics and nanoscience. One $1,000,000 prize will be awarded for each of the three fields in Norway next year. Sound like another Scandanavian award? Unlike Nobel prizes, which tend to reward scientists at the ends of their careers, the Kavli Prize will recognize innovation, according to a recent article in Time magazine. Fred Kavli, a Norwegian physicist/business mogul/philanthropist, has been funding giant awards for (the odd mix of scientific pursuits) neuroscience, astrophysics and nanoscience research at universities, like Caltech, Harvard, MIT and Cambridge. So, if you know of a deserving neuroscientist, the application deadline is 15 December.

If you think managing chemical waste in your lab is like throwing money down the drain, imagine how Daniel Storm feels. According to the Seattle Post Intelligencer, rather than paying $15,000 to properly dispose of 5 cans of ethyl ether, the professor of pharmacology at the University of Washington took an axe to them and poured them down the drain. According to Nature, Storm falsified waste manifest sheets in an attempt to cover up the crime. Storm was sentenced to 3 years of probation, 80 hours of community service and a $5,000 fine in U. S. District Court and is undergoing university disciplinary review.

Like most people who have had to sit through the courses and fill out the monthly paperwork required to dispose of anything other than water, I can understand Storm’s frustration. Do people in hazmat suits really need to close down a building over a broken thermometer? However, you don’t have to be an environmentalist to realize that pouring an extremely flammable liquid into university pipes isn’t a terribly smart thing to do.

That’s what Gary Lynch said of the physiological mechanism of memory in 2005 when L. A. Times reporter Terry McDermott asked to visit Lynch’s University of California, Irvine lab. McDermott returned repeatedly, and his findings were featured last week in an epic four-part series in the L. A. Times.

The series reads like engrossing Greek drama, complete with a misunderstood hero and the tragicomedy of high stakes science. Lynch is painted as the lone wolf battling evil editors and competitors to get the truth out. Although it’s over-dramatized and Lynch’s role is perhaps a bit overstated, the science, aimed entirely at the lay person, is quite good. According to a recent report from the Pew Research Center, few Americans (19%) follow science news, so if it takes high drama to sell science stories to the public, I’m all for it. McDermott should be congratulated for getting neuroscience on the front page.

It’s been a tough month for parents. Open a newspaper, and you are virtually guaranteed to read about the latest environmental toxin seeping into children’s blood and endangering neuronal or reproductive development. Mattel recalled toys that may be coated in lead paint. Meanwhile, a committee at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) declared ‘some concern’ that a compound in many plastics, bisphenol A (BPA), affects neuronal development. And finally, the University of California at Davis announced a several million dollar study of possible environmental triggers for autism.

If you are a parent and also a scientist, what is the proper response to the conflicting urges to protect your children and evaluate the data? Rebecca Roberts, a biochemist who studies BPA, writes in PLoS Biology:

The mother in me still waits anxiously for the regulatory agencies and the legislature to catch up with the research on BPA that the scientist in me appreciates. I have switched my brand of sippy cups to one that doesn’t contain BPA (a quick internet search will yield many sites describing these and other BPA-free baby products). Nevertheless, while I feel proactive as I watch my daughter happily drink her water, I still cringe a little bit when she drops the sippy cup, toddles over to her toy bin, and starts to gnaw on her plastic turtle instead.

Keeping the commoners happy is easy when you have pharmacology on your side. Complex caste systems exist throughout the animal kingdom, but is it purely social feedback that keeps us all in our places? Vergoz, Shreurs and Mercer report that a pheromone prevents worker honeybees from forming aversive associations while they serve the queen in a recent article in Science.

In the honeybee society, the females do all of the work. Young females attend to the queen and her hive. Later in life, they leave the hive to collect nectar and pollen (the average honeybee lifespan is 4-6 weeks). Queen mandibular pheromone (QMP), which is produced by the queen and transferred to the rest of the hive by her caretakers, prevents the ovarian development of other females.

Honeybees show both appetitive (positively reinforced) and aversive (negatively reinforced) learning. In response to odors, honeybees can be trained to extend their tongues in anticipation of a sweet reward or extend their stingers in anticipation of a shock. Octopamine and dopamine are important in appetitive and aversive learning, respectively. QMP alters brain dopamine levels. Does QMP affect aversive learning?

The authors found that QMP blocked aversive, but not appetitive learning in 6-day-old female bees. However, QMP had no effect on aversive learning in 15-day-old female bees.

How does QMP affect aversive learning? The QMP component homovanillyl alcohol (HVA) blocked aversive learning, whereas another QMP component hydroxybenzoate (HOB) did not. HVA is similar in structure to dopamine, so HVA may be responsible for the QMP-mediated reduction in brain dopamine and the decline in dopamine-mediated aversive learning.

Why block aversive learning in subordinates? The authors speculate that QMP prevents young attendants from forming aversive associations with the queen and therefore promotes loyalty and diligence. Perhaps the age-dependent decline in QMP’s effect on aversive learning induces older honeybees to leave the hive.

It is highly unlikely that humans have an Orwellian pheromone mediating subservience. However, there probably is a QMP keeping us in our societal places: the Quantity of Money in our Pockets.

Instead of a tough-talking mayor, new windows may be to thank for the drop in violent crime in New York City. The Washington Post reports that according to economist Rick Nevin, 65-95% of the variation in violent crime in 9 countries can be explained by lead. Nevins claims that crime rates rise and fall approximately 20 years after environmental lead concentrations increase and decrease, respectively. This theory isn’t new, but its relation to American politics is. Rudy Giuliani, former New York City mayor and current presidential candidate, claims that his law enforcement policies reduced homicides by 67% and total crime by 57% during his tenure as mayor from 1994-2001. Nevins argues that Giuliani benefited from policies in the 1960s to replace old lead windows (to reduce deadly falls) and in the 1970s and 1980s to reduce lead in paint and gasoline.

Lead is a neurotoxin that passes through the blood-brain barrier. Lidsky and Schneider report that lead mimics calcium in brain cells, disturbing endogenous calcium levels and inducing cytochrome C release from mitochondria. Lead also increases basal levels of acetylcholine, dopamine and amino acid neurotransmitters but reduces their activity-dependent release. Because children often put their hands in their mouths, they are susceptible to exposure to lead in paint. What are the behavioral effects of lead? Herbert Needleman, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh, reported increased lead levels in the bones of 11-year-old children with antisocial and delinquent behaviors and adolescents who had been through the penal system relative to their peers, suggesting that lead increases sociopathic behaviors and impulsivity.

Perhaps these data indicate that it’s time for political candidates to pipe down about their past achievements and speak up about how they intend to clean up the environment.

It’s double-blind or nothing when it comes to phase III clinical trials. Although placebo groups are absolutely vital to the clinical validity of medical treatments, a recent article in The Lancet has me thinking about the ethics of treating desperate patients with saline.

The subthalamic nucleus is overactive in people with Parkinson’s disease, presumably because it loses GABAergic input from the globus pallidus. Subthalamic nucleus lesions improve Parkinson’s disease symptoms. Kaplitt et al. generated a gene therapy agent that would silence but not destroy subthalamic nuclei neurons. They inserted glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD), the enzyme responsible for GABA production, into a viral vector and injected it into subthalamic nuclei of people with Parkinson’s disease. In their phase I trial in 12 patients, the authors showed that their therapy was safe and virtually side-effect-free. Unlike most phase I trials, the authors also showed that their treatment was effective: intra-thalamic injections of the GAD agent reduced Parkinson’s symptoms.

That’s great news for a possible new treatment for Parkinson’s disease. But it also means that at some point soon, people with advanced Parkinson’s symptoms will volunteer for brain surgery and a 50% chance at treatment. Some would argue that even placebos have their upside, and I certainly understand their importance. I also understand that the patients who volunteer for these studies are often at the end of their medical ropes and are willing to roll the dice. I just feel for the folks who wake up 6 months after surgery and realize that their symptoms haven’t improved.

Enough with the cranes already! Richard Powers’s 2006 novel The Echo Maker, a National Book Award winner, is a great book to take to the beach (or the bench while the PCR machine is running), even if it is about 100 pages too long.

The Echo Maker follows Mark Schluter’s recovery from a mysterious car accident that leaves him with Capgras syndrome, the delusion that one’s loved ones have been replaced by imposters. His sister Karin calls in a celebrity neuroscientist, the Oliver Sacks-ish Dr. Gerald Weber, and all three struggle with issues of identity and self. Oh, and there are also those blasted cranes, who pass through this book far more frequently than they do the Nebraska Platte described in the novel.

Capgras is a fascinating disorder worthy of fiction and nonfiction alike. Ramachandran describes Capgras, in which familiar faces fail to illicit proper emotional responses, as the mirror to prosapagnosia, the inability to recognize faces. He has suggested that injury-induced Capgras (approximately 33% of all Capgras cases) may be caused by lesions of the connections between the inferior temporal cortex and the amygdala. Capgras patients, unlike people with amygdala lesions, show elevated galvanic skin responses to emotional stimuli, but not to pictures of people they know, suggesting that it’s not the amygdala itself that is affected, but the information flow to the amygdala from the visual cortex.

Like Ramachandran’s case study D. S. (not me, I swear), Mark Schluter doubles himself, describing his pre-injury self as ‘old Mark’, someone who looks very much like the person he used to be. Powers sprinkles references to 9/11 throughout The Echo Maker, perhaps implying that we are all quite different than the people we used to be. A point very elegantly made, but one that used way too many birds in the making.

TV’s Mr. Wizard, Don Herbert, died yesterday. He was the first (and favorite) science teacher for several generations of children. He will be greatly missed.

“One is 95 percent certainty, and the other is…50 percent and a feather”

According to attorney Kevin Conway (quoted in the Washington Post), that is the difference between the scientific and legal burden of proof that autism is related to childhood vaccines. Conway represents one of more than 4800 families who believe that a vaccine preservative caused autism in their loved ones and are suing for compensation from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund. The first test case is before the U. S. Court of Federal Claims today.

An editorial in the May issue described the lack of scientific data supporting this claim. However, the timing of this hearing is particularly interesting. Just days ago, the media generated a frenzy over Andrew Speaker, the American lawyer with a drug resistant form of tuberculosis who flew on commercial airplanes. Perhaps because vaccines have worked so well in combating diseases like polio, many in the west have been lulled into a false sense of security when it comes to diseases that are common in ‘the rest of the world’. The court should certainly weigh the global health impact of a generation of American children who are not vaccinated. Conversely, we must continue to ensure that despite our hysteria over modern health threats, like small pox and avian flu, vaccine companies test and retest their products (and publish their data!) before rushing them out to nervous consumers.

The Post points out the biggest losers in the autism court battle: autistic children. Although my heart goes out to the plaintiffs in this case, one has to wonder what therapies and services could be purchased for the price of the legal blame game.