Science - International Graduate Program Medical Neurosciences

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12 Research on Researchers JR: Do you have a message for aspiring neuroscience students today? Search and enjoy - Don‘t trust textbooks or authorities - Think outside the box - Read scientifi c literature from outside your fi eld, also read the ‚old stuff‘, but then don‘t believe what you have just read - Cherish serendipity - Don‘t take shortcuts - Try to understand the general picture - alternatively: explain to your grandmother what your research is about - Follow your instincts rather than a strategy - Boldly go where no man has gone before - The day has twenty-four hours, and this still leaves you with the night (credited to Josef!) - If all this is too much advice, here is my last one: as written on the front page of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - Don‘t panic! JR: Last, but not least, who are the researchers (dead or alive) whom you consider as your role models? I don‘t buy into the concept of role models. Role models are bad for your brain. But let‘s rephrase the question: Which researchers impressed me the most? The one who invented polyurethane wheels, of course! Just kidding. There are too many to be listed, and sorry, all are already dead. But let‘s try. I am puzzled and humbled by scientists who produce quantum leaps in our understanding, and I do not even comprehend how on earth they were able to ask their question, let alone fi nd an answer to it. Top of the list are: Erathostenes, who around 200 BC calculated the circumference of the earth, all sitting in his home town in Egypt, measuring a single angle, and doing a bit of simple geometry. He not only realized that the earth was a globe, he was able to determine its size with an error of below 2%! Ask yourself how you would do it, without Google Earth or Wikipedia, just with a stick and a clay table 2011 International Graduate Program Medical Neurosciences CNSNewsletter June 2011 to scribble, on a sunny summer day! Of course all the renaissance scientists, probably the fi rst that deserve that name in the modern sense, cleaning and clearing up after almost 2 millenia of Aristotelian thinking. Then guys like Leibniz, who among many other achievements the other day invented infi nitesimal calculus, and not even bothered to publish it. In an exhibition at the Gropius Bau, I recently saw his original notes, in which he on a few pages develops calculus - unbelievable! Let‘s not talk about Newton, completely incomprehensible to me how he arrived at gravitation, let alone laws for it. Most people at that time thought that matter falls down because the earth is the immobile center of everything, which actually makes a lot more sense than the idea that we are passengers on a rock speeding through the universe! Or Alexander von Humboldt, who explored South America, and climbed the Chimborazo to an altitude of beyond 6000 meters to fi nd out how great heights and therefore lack of oxygen affect human physiology. He was vomiting, bleeding, almost died, recorded everything meticulously together with physical measurements on heavy instruments which he carried to the peak, and descended again. In his late eighties, he was still corresponding with many of his peers, through around 3000 handwritten letters per year. And we complain about a cluttered inbox and spam mail. Darwin I already mentioned. Physics - I don‘t understand their science, but what guys like Maxwell, Planck, via Einstein, Bohr, to Feynman did to our understanding of the physical world, it‘s incomprehensible to me. I got to stop here. I sincerely believe that biology (and thus medicine) is still in a Newtonian stage, but maybe I am overly optimistic and it‘s rather Aristotelian... We need scientists of the caliber like the ones just mentioned to take us to the next level. To infi nity, and beyond!(jr)
CNSNewsletter June 2011 Neuroscience in Your Everday Life www.medical-neurosciences.de 13 Dr. Harebrained Knows it all... Do you also sometimes wonder about the simple questions in the neuroscientific everyday life? But you don’t really feel like looking them up right away? If you are sitting at your desk right now and glance around, don’t you also ask yourself what the neuronal mechanisms are that might explain why you cannot see the flickering of the neon lamp? Why the older co-worker can’t hear this annoying peep from this instrument in the wet lab? Why you always become tired at 4 pm and what exactly happens when a strong cup of coffee combats this daily low? For questions like this we now have a new rubric in our newsletter: ‘Dr. Harebrained knows it all’... just mail us your question and Dr. Harebrained will give us his explanation in the next issue! The kick-off question came across my mind during breakfast: Why is it again, that everything tastes so much better with some salt? Read Dr. Harebrained’s answer in the next issue.(jr) Berlin Brain Days 2011 7–9 December 2011 For more information visit: http://neuroscience-berlin.de/bbd/
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