india: lecture-fest (13)

alright.. after a brief hiatus, i am back. i have officially reached the point where the novelty of seeking out nice-looking neurons in my slides has worn off, and a supplementation of daily activities with blog posting is in order.

what have i been doing, really, in the past week? between 3 hour blocks of time in front of the microscope, i have been able to attend daily lectures from visiting scientists at NCBS. apparently, in a stroke of good timing, my trip coincides with an international calcium-signaling workshop. this workshop went on last week somewhere nearby, but the faculty at NCBS managed to pull each famous scientist visiting for this purpose out for a day to give a talk here. as a result, in the past week, i've heard about some pretty incredible research on 2-photon microscopy for real-time calcium imaging in Drosophila (i.e. fruit flies), the role of calcium signaling in T-cell development (i.e. developing cells of the immune system), the role of calcium signaling in determining receptor populations at developing synapses (i.e. in cells of the nervous system), and (from a non-calcium perspective) vesicle endocytosis (i.e. how the little packages carrying transmitter to synapses are taken back into the cell for recycling). even if this sounds like a foreign language, i'm sure you can appreciate the breadth of topics covered.

i was also lucky to catch two lectures by a French physicist, who seemed to be visiting for reasons other than the calcium workshop. the first was a relatively brief summary of three instances in which this professor and his lab had taken biological problems and considered them from a physical perspective, while the second was more focused on how physics can be used to generate artificial cell systems for applications in biology. i strongly believe that biologists and neuroscientists can benefit from interactions with people from other fields, and it was truly inspiring to hear this physicist speak. he was obviously in the later stages of his career, but he brought a refreshing perspective to issues that biologists continue to look at in the same old way. sometime they should have a conference where a bunch of academics from every field (including the humanities and social sciences!) are randomly selected and sent to an island for a week. i bet that at least one discussion would lead to a major scientific development, just from taking a new angle on a problem.

the public dinner i mentioned earlier was held on friday night for the french physicist. this involved eating outside, at tables set out by the pond behind the dining hall. there were red and white striped canopies, and white table cloths, and i felt like i was stepping into a scene from late summer picnic in the 1950s. except instead of rolled cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches, they served mutton with curry, chapatis, and some other spicy dishes that provided a welcome departure from the normal dining hall fare. all in all, a lovely lecture and a lovely evening.