HHMI asks four researchers, including two locals, the question "What do you with you had known before you started your lab?

Phillip Zamore of UMass Medical School has this to say:

Nothing. The process of discovery has made having my own lab so rewarding. I’ve discovered strengths I didn’t know I had as well as weaknesses that required hard work to improve. I discovered—much to my shock—that pink sheets aren’t pink, that the collective wisdom of a lab is often wiser than the opinions of a lone PI, and that managing a successful research team requires both teamwork and promoting individual talent. Had someone told me in advance the secrets to building and running a lab, I’d have struggled a bit less in the beginning. But I’d have also undervalued the pleasure of the struggle itself, and I would have missed out on so many wonderful surprises.

The Longwood Symphony also makes an appearance in the magazine-like quarterly. (See our NNB multimedia story on the medical musicians’ recent conference.)

Finally, the story on neuroscientist (and champion sailor) Mark Bear features a photo in his office, which overlooks the Stata Center. (Here in Cambridge, the Frank Gehry-designed building is known as “The Drunken Robot.”)

Over a quarter century, Bear has tacked toward elusive problems in his field. His main obsession has been brain plasticity: the process by which neurons change in response to experience. Early on, he explored neural connections in the hippocampus, which plays a key role in long-term memory and spatial navigation. Controversially, he used these findings as a model for a very different part of the brain, the visual cortex.

More recently, Bear has applied his discoveries in brain plasticity to understanding fragile X syndrome, an inherited form of mental impairment. He has described surprising mechanisms underlying fragile X and has shepherded a promising treatment through phase 2 clinical trials testing for efficacy in patients. The course he has charted may yield the first neurobehavioral targeted pharmaceutical treatment that grew from the bottom up: from gene discovery to an understanding of pathophysiology to a targeted drug.