"How we wish that you had been differently employed"

This one is for some folks I’ve been engaging with on the Twitts about Uncle Siggy…

Link to Youtube

Don’t forget DrZen’s comment:

Freud was a comparative neuroanatomist who made significant discoveries: http://bit.ly/vf3qK

"If we stand together as a community…"

A letter to the editor has recently been published in the Journal of Neurophysiology by authors Ringach and Jentsch. You may recall that these individuals are neuroscience researchers who have come under attack by extremist animal rights activists. These brave investigators have been stepping up in public to defend the conduct of animal research. The letter asks for your help, DearReader, as do I. Ringach and Jentsch conclude their letter as follows:

Despite being in the spotlight, our work is not different from the majority of articles appearing in the pages of this Journal and has always been in compliance with all the regulations on the use of animals in research. Investigators using primates, mice, or flies have been assaulted, so nobody can feel at ease. With an expanding list of investigators listed in the extremists’ crosshairs, it is clear that anybody could be next.
Enough is enough! We believe time has come to express our outrage at the activities of animal rights extremists and to request from our political representatives the security we and our families need to carry out our work. We believe that time has also come to discuss, debate, and express our opinions on the importance and ethics of animal research. Perhaps, most important, the time has also come to defend our research collectively and not to let only those under attack confront their plight alone.

One place to start is to stay aware. Follow @RaisingVoices and read / bookmark the Speaking of Research pages on ARA activities / talking points and research facts.
Sign the Pro-Test petition in support of the use of animals in well-regulated and responsible research.

Biology? You should try Psychology my friend.

Greg Laden has an absolutely fantastic post up on “The Falsehoods” in which he observes:

Biology is harder to learn than quantum physics. Why? Because most people think they totally get biology, but everyone knows nobody gets quantum physics. Therefore, any effort to explore quantum physics will result in new learning, but people rarely learn new biology. The bottom line is that our brains are full of biology, which would be good if most of it did not consist of falsehoods.

This is great stuff.

Perplexing PI Lever Pressing

The CSR directives assure us that the priority scores for our grants will be available on eRA Commons within 3 working days of the conclusion of the study section meeting. Of course, we have generally been waiting 4-5 months after initial submission for the study section to be held for a given grant.
Why do we do this?

RIP: Henry G. Molaison (1926-2008)

The man who constituted one of the best explored case studies in cognitive psychology, perhaps the best explored case study ever, has passed away. As reported in the Montreal Gazette:

The 82-year-old man scientists have known only as HM died of heart failure Tuesday after decades in a Connecticut chronic care home, unaware of what he gave to science.

In short, H.M. suffered intractable epilepsy for which he underwent a removal of large portions of his temporal lobes. Although successful in curbing his seizures, the procedure resulted in a anterograde memory loss resulting in an individual stuck in time. The rather selective nature of his impairment led to a huge number of investigations and information on the neuronal basis of various processes that we think of under the general term”memory”.
RIP, H.M., voluntarily or not you are a lion of science.
[additional here; h/t: PP]

Repost: Musty Must-Read: "A study of trial and error reactions in mammals"

Recent discussion of the way papers should be presented and comments on the way papers were written in the good old days when Uncle Sol was a wee scientist motivated me to repost something I put up on the old blog July 11, 2007.

---

First, I’ll tip the hat to Shelley at Retrospectacle for starting a “tour of the vaults” with the classic LSD in elephants study. Today, I’m reaching way back for “A study of trial and error reactions in mammals” by G. V. Hamilton, Journal of Animal Behavior, 1911 Jan-Feb 1(1):33-66. This study is worth reading because it provides an often hilarious insight into the conduct of science at the turn of the past century but also because this study is a root (perhaps the taproot) of a relatively current subfield on spatial working memory and spatial search.

Ordering labs on drug abusers

PalMD poses a really interesting question regarding the medical ethics of running lab tests on a patient to determine if they are drunk:

So here’s a non-life-and-death question: if a patient comes to see you and smells of alcohol, can you add an alcohol level to their blood work without specifically informing them?

As he points out, patients sign a generalized consent for treatment and generally do not expect to micromanage their doctor’s recommendations for tests that need to be run. I would imagine that doctors hardly ever inform their patients, item by item, what will be run on basic blood chemistry and immune panels. I would similarly imagine that should the doctor decide on a followup or two after some initial results s/he might just run them first and tell the patient later if it was a significant health issue.
So why not add a BAL (Blood Alcohol Level; a description of measurements including the familiar blood-alcohol concentration of legal importance) if you suspect a patient has been drinking?

Insightful Animal Behavior: A “Sufficiently Advanced Technology”

In the midst of World War I, Wolfgang Köhler conducted a famous series of experiments to investigate problem solving ability in chimpanzees. The lasting impression of these experiments, reinforced by just about every introductory Psychology text, was Köhler’s assertion that the chimps demonstrated “insightful” learning.
Did they now?

Insightful Animal Behavior: A "Sufficiently Advanced Technology"

In the midst of World War I, Wolfgang Köhler conducted a famous series of experiments to investigate problem solving ability in chimpanzees. The lasting impression of these experiments, reinforced by just about every introductory Psychology text, was Köhler’s assertion that the chimps demonstrated “insightful” learning.
Did they now?