I flew in this morning and thought I would easily make it to Frank Gehry’s talk at noon, but this being my first time in Atlanta it took me a while to find my hotel, so I missed it. Bummer. Do write in and let me know what he spoke about. I assume he was less controversial than last year’s “Neuroscience and Society Dialogues” speaker 🙂

I poked my head into the symposium on the ongoing efforts to cure Parkinson’s with dopaminergic neurons derived from ES cells (progress is being made, though as usual the goal seems to recede as we approach it), and learned about synaptic scaling from Gina Turrigiano’s polished presentation. Michael Sendtner however made my day when he told me that Bavarian politicians were impressed by our recent editorial on a new competitive university funding scheme in Germany (in our June issue). Bavarian politicians are a notoriously crusty bunch, very hard to impress. This scary guy is the prototype of homo politicus bavariensis – the Munich airport is named after him…