Drosopholist extraordinaire Ralph Greenspan will be signing copies of his latest books at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press booth (Booth 207) at the Neuroscience Meeting in San Diego, Monday, November 5 at 2 PM. Greenspan is probably best known for his book “Fly Pushing: The Theory and Practice of Drosophila Genetics”. This book teaches the essentials of working with flies and does so in an impressively readable and engaging manner. Ralph’s recent book, “An Introduction to Nervous Systems” has been met with rave reviews (read Nature’s, Nature Neuroscience’s and Bioessay’s). It’s a wonderful primer for Neuroscientists, teaching the principles of nervous systems from an evolutionary viewpoint, starting with the simplest single-celled organisms and adding complexity up to the level of invertebrates like flies. And because that wasn’t enough work, Ralph has also served as an editor, along with Geoffrey North, on a contributed monograph on “Invertebrate Neurobiology”, which gives an up-to-date snapshot of the state of this rapidly expanding field.

…article continues… Read the rest of this entry »

A few bits and pieces on science and the web to start the week:

Caltech’s Engineering and Science Magazine has an article on science blogging. Interesting comment from Sean Carroll (the blogging physicist, not the evolutionary biologist):

Despite the proliferation of physics blogs, Carroll is not very optimistic about them taking a more prominent role in physics research. From posting papers on arXiv.org to e-mail, the current way in which physicists communicate is already efficient. Blogs, however, could serve as a place for specialists and nonspecialists to interact, chipping away at the barriers separating academia from the general public. Still, most physics blogs are written by students or nonscientists who are interested in physics–and not professional physicists, Carroll says. “I think physicists have been slower to catch onto blogs than people in the social sciences or humanities,” he explains. “Physics is more of an esoteric topic where we talk to each other rather than the outside world.” For instance, blogging in technical detail about the cosmological effects of Lorentz-violating vector field–one of Carroll’s areas of research–probably has a limited audience. For him, Cosmic Variance’s purpose is clear. “We don’t have a lot of goals other than us having fun,” he says.

…article continues… Read the rest of this entry »

Official press release below:
October 25, 2007

Dr. James D. Watson Retires
as Chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) today announced that Dr. James D. Watson, 79, has retired after nearly 40 years of distinguished service to CSHL. He had stepped down as President of CSHL in 2003 and most recently served as Chancellor. Read the rest of this entry »

2007 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of Molecular Cloning: A Laboratory Manual. Originally published as a single volume, Molecular Cloning was based on the protocols used during the 1980 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory course on the Molecular Cloning of Eukaryotic Genes. A set of photocopied protocols was widely distributed in 1981, and over the course of the year, the manual was written. It’s impossible to overstate the impact this manual had on a rapidly expanding field. While it wasn’t the first Molecular Biology laboratory manual ever published (that would be Miller’s Experiments in Molecular Genetics from CSHL Press), Molecular Cloning was the book that really put the techniques into every lab’s hands. It opened a door for many researchers into the world of recombinant DNA technology and played a significant role in spreading these approaches through the scientific community. A look back at the reviews of the various editions gives an interesting picture of how quickly Molecular Cloning became such a laboratory standard. Read the rest of this entry »

In keeping with the recent knockout mouse Nobel Prize award, I wanted to highlight a transgenesis paper in this month’s CSH Protocols from Richard Behringer and colleagues, on the use of transposon-containing plasmids and transposase-encoding mRNA for the generation of transgenic rats. Read the rest of this entry »

Statement by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Board of Trustees and President Bruce Stillman, Ph.D. Regarding Dr. Watson’s Comments in The Sunday Times on October 14, 2007:

“The comments attributed to Dr. James Watson that first appeared in the October 14, 2007 edition of The Sunday Times U.K. are his own personal statements and in no way reflect the mission, goals, or principles of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Board, administration or faculty. Dr. Watson is not the President of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and was not speaking on behalf of the institution.

“The Board of Trustees, administration and faculty vehemently disagree with these statements and are bewildered and saddened if he indeed made such comments. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory does not engage in any research that could even form the basis of the statements attributed to Dr. Watson.

“Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s renowned commitment to scientific research in the areas of cancer, neurological diseases, and plant genetics has and continues to dramatically benefit human-kind throughout the world.”

For more information, visit www.cshl.edu.

I know I’m a week or so late, but congratulations are in order for Martin Evans, Oliver Smithies and Mario Capecchi for winning the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells”. Read the rest of this entry »

Fluorescence Imaging with One Nanometer Accuracy (FIONA) is a method for localizing single fluorophores (or single groups of fluorophores) in the X-Y plane with high spatial resolution. In the October issue of CSH Protocols, Paul Selvin and colleagues provide a series of articles explaining the concepts behind FIONA (and several related techniques) as well as protocols for FIONA equipment set-up, chamber construction, imaging and data analysis. Read the rest of this entry »

October’s issue of CSH Protocols is now online. I’m very happy about one of the featured freely available protocols, Preparation of Rodent Hippocampal Slice Cultures. I’ve been digging through our Neuroscience Imaging protocols for months now, and have been unable to post many of them on CSH Protocols, because they deal with slice cultures. Each seems to start with an established culture and proceeds to explain an imaging technique that can be used with it. Each referenced the Stoppini et al., paper from 1991 that doesn’t seem to be available online, other than as an abstract. Luckily for us all, Michael Dailey and his lab at the University of Iowa were willing to write up a modern update of the method. They’ve included a very useful movie showing one of the tricker parts of the technique. With this in place, you can now expect more neuro-imaging to turn up in CSH Protocols over the next few months, including this month’s protocols for Imaging Microglia in Live Brain Slices and Slice Cultures, Imaging FM Dyes in Brain Slices and Imaging Zinc in Brain Slices.