Adrian P. Bird

from: http://www.rsrt.org/about-rsrt/adrian-p-bird-ph-d.html

Adrian P. Bird, Ph.D. is the world's leading expert in the gene, MECP2, responsible for Rett Syndrome when mutated. His lab studies the structure and function of the mammalian genome and in particular the role of DNA methylation, a fundamental mechanism of controlling gene expression.

In February of 2007 Dr. Bird published a landmark paper in Science establishing the principle of reversibility of Rett symptoms in mice thereby suggesting the same may be true for people.

Dr. Bird became Buchanan Professor of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh in 1990. There he played a prominent role in setting up the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology, where he has been director since 1999. Dr. Bird has been a Governor of the Wellcome Trust, the world's largest medical research charity, since 2000. In April of 2007 he was appointed Deputy Chairman. In his leadership position he oversees assets totaling more than $27 billion.

Dr. Bird is also the past Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Rett Syndrome Research Foundation and Breakthrough Breast Cancer UK as well as a Trustee of the Kirkhouse Trust. He serves on the editorial boards of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Molecular Cell.

Dr. Bird studied at the University of Sussex and the University of Edinburgh. He has received numerous awards and honors, including the prestigious Howard Hughes International Fellowship, the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine and the Gabor Medal of the Royal Society. He is a Fellow of the Royal Societies of London and Edinburgh and of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

More on Dr. Bird's research:
Dr. Bird isolated a family of proteins (known as methyl-CpG-binding domain proteins, or MBD proteins) who have the ability to bind to methylated genes, thereby regulating their expression. The family of MBD proteins includes the patriarch MeCP2 which Dr. Bird isolated while at the Research Institute for Molecular Pathology in Vienna. The complete family includes MBD1, MBD2, MBD3, and MBD4. Human MBD proteins are considered housekeeping proteins because they are widely expressed in all tissues. Research in the Bird lab is currently focused on studying the biology of the MBD protein family using biochemical and genetic approaches.

Roderick MacKinnon

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2003
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2003/mackinnon-autobio.html

Tonight's first speaker: Kári Stefánsson

Dr. Kári Stefánsson, M.D., Dr.Med. from the University of Iceland, is the Chairman, CEO and co-founder of deCODE Genetics and a former professor of neurology, neuropathology and neuroscience at Harvard University (1993-1997). From 1993-1996 he was director of neuropathology at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital. Dr. Kári also held faculty positions at the University of Chicago.

Kári opened the NASDAQ Stock Market on July 20, 2005, after deCode's five year anniversary on the NASDAQ Market.

He was on the Time 100 list in 2007.

(Wikipedia.)

http://stephenslab.uchicago.edu/software.html

3rd speaker
Brendan J. Keating
http://public.nhlbi.nih.gov/GeneticsGenomics/home/care.aspx

Meeting Buzsaki

So, how does everything goes with Gyorgy Buzsaki?

Well, mixed feelings.

This is one of the greatest scientific talk that I have ever experienced. The whole conference room is silence, entire silence. The talk is interesting, not because of showing some fantastic, funny while amazing things, but by the way it's clearly shown. The speaker just draw you into the deep world of his logical world. You can't deny anything because everything is so convincing, and because you just want to get into the new insight he opened to you try to imagine further. I'm just wondering what he can do in his next talk if he want to use different slides, because this series of slide is almost perfect. Perfectly clear and reasonable.

You might imagine the question section to be even hotter than last time's. Actually no. Paul Adams is also there, but he didn't question anything. Unusualy, this time's faculty tend to be silent, while students asked some questions. You know in normal times, the faculties came up with a lot of brilliant questions. But this time, few of them asked, and actually the ones even I can come up with an answer.

David say he seems not welcoming questions. Well, think over, that's seems true. Most of the seminar speakers I see, will specifically encourage people to ask and don't forget to give feedback to the questions they asked. He didn't do that specially. I'm sure he likes people asking questions. But the lecture he made, seems to give no chance for people to ask questions. I still remember when we went to talk with him about some questions after the talk, he would tell us that there's foible where where on his own.

Actually I didn't ask any questions except for asking if there are any way to get an discount on his book. :) Everyone got into laugh including him. But he did answer my questions seriously. Normally I asked a lot of questions during the one and a half hour discussion, but you know what, this time is mainly he asking us questions! He asked us why choose neuroscience rather any other scientific subjects, why neuroscience rather that other biology branches; what's the difference between people in biotechnology and us. He said I'm sure none of you come to this field aim to publish a paper. Silence this time, because everyone can't imagine how you can get graduated without publishments, how we can get our future jobs without a paper. Then he said do any one of you worry about what kind of position you'll get later, we don't care, right? Silence again, of course you don't need to worry about anything like this. But you are true, when we just choose this field, we don't think about papers, tenures -- only science.

All the questions he asked I never gave out the one he wanted. He gave an example that imagine there's 10billion treasure underneath somewhere of SB campus, what's the quickest way to get it. I said buy the whole campus then you can do whatever you want. Of course I mistook him, he is looking for a scientific answer. The securest way is to dig the campus square by square, but the quickest way is just random search. All through the whole lunch time is like this, he raised many questions, we are like headless flies, try to think and answer as much as possible but never got his clue.

Gyorgy Buzsaki

http://osiris.rutgers.edu/BuzsakiHP/Personnel/Members/Buzsaki/buzsaki.html He must be a very interesting guy, I'm looking forward to meeting him tomorrow!

Steven A. Siegelbaum, HHMI investigator

Introduction in HHMI

Dr. Siegelbaum is also Professor of Pharmacology in the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He received his A.B. degree in biochemical sciences from Harvard College and his Ph.D. degree from Yale University, where he studied the role of calcium in cardiac electrical activity. He then did postdoctoral research with David Colquhoun at University College London and with Philippe Ascher at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, studying the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor ion channel. Dr. Siegelbaum has received the Herbert J. Kayden Award in biomedical science from the New York Academy of Sciences.

Last Thursday our program invited Dr. Siegelbaum over to give a talk. Before hand we read the pre-print handed out by him, it's the 2004 paper in cell. Actually this paper elicited strong discussion in our class, although a little bit negative to it. It's normal because it's really hard when things suddenly comes to behavior level, every result significant or unsignificant, hard to believe, expecially for molecularists. It's hard to deny that this paper can go to Cell probably partly because of the biggest people in neuroscience, Kandel. He is a extreme character in scientific world, as David said.

When I first saw Steve on the seminar, he is like the picture above, looks very nice as David told us. Actually I heard his voice when he came to David's office and I was just in the lab doing experiments. I like the way he walked slowly in the front while speaking, with the look of thinking deeply. That's the scientist, I said to myself. He started from the background of cerebellum, then come the HCN channels and the figures from the paper, not staying there too long, he went to his non-Hebbian thoery---Input Timing-Dependent Plasticity(ITDP). The question section was really hot. Paul Adams was also there. Of course he will definitely be the core listener. One of his questions is actully mine. :( :( Like always, later on I felt very regretted for being not confident enough to ask questions.

Later we eat lunch together. That's a very nice time. I planned to wrote something about him. But coming up so late, I could simply wrote a diary, forgetting all those words I kept in mind to say.

Paul Adams

I met him in class. He is a real scientist. You have to like him, he was so cute when discribing science to you; You have to admire him, becase you can feel that he is the embodiment of science; You will be moved by the way he dipicts science, you have to be attracted; You feel like you are so far away from him, because all his thoughts are so brilliant that normal people can never easily understand; You want to fall into laugh when he seems to care nothing except for science, the way he wear, the way he drink or move, but you won't because you respect him from the bottom of your heart; He will use any thing surround as a model, a pen can be a model in discribing steady-state on the axon, he will take your mp3 recorder as a model of linear association in synaptic connections, he don't bother to draw on his hand for demonstration; You can never get high scores on his exam, because it's impossible for you to fully understand a genius's thoughts...

When the old neuroscience student-fellows who graduated in 1980s, we still have the common topic of Paul Adams. What I know is that he is Fellows of the Royal Society. He is the discoverer of M-current. But then he give up his lab because he don't like the department's request for him to do something he don't like. He keeps his lectures going on all the years, to neuroscience graduate students, also to under-graduates.

Here is a interesting website of his current research, which really kind of have his style inside. "SYNAPTIC DARWINISM": http://www.syndar.org/

Henri Korn ( cited from a news in Oct, 1998)

Henri Korn is a French neurobiologist of international reputation known for his intellectual passion, deep knowledge of American culture and his accomplishments in both neuroscience and the humanities. For many years a visiting research professor at UB, Korn is director of the Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

Although his principal research is in synaptic transmission and the functional organization of the central nervous system, Korn also is a longtime serious student of philosophy and literature who in recent years has become increasingly concerned with the interplay between scientific and humanistic inquiry.

Jackson describes Korn as "a true intellectual, a man with a relentless passion for inquiry into and discussion of ideas. His knowledge of American culture is profound," Jackson said, "not just because he is a passionate reader or because of the many years he lived in the United States while doing research at UB and the Albert Einsten Medical Center. It's also because he has traveled widely and has an uncanny ability to get ordinary people to take him into their lives and let him see what they're really about."

Although his research at Pasteur focuses on the way the nerves "talk" to each other, he sees scientific inquiry not as a realm apart, but as part of the world of ideas and society, which, Jackson said, was why he was invited to give the lecture.

Korn received medical and doctoral degrees from the University of Paris. From 1991-93, he was scientific advisor to French Secretary of Defense Pierre Joxe. In 1992, he was awarded the Richard Lounsbery Prize by the National Academy of Science and the Académie des Sciences. He was elected to the Academia Europaea (1989), the French Academy of Sciences (1990) and the European Academy of Arts, Sciences and Humanities (1995).