Hello again, it’s been a while so I thought I’d drop in a comment or two about what I’ve found recently in the news about neurobio. I’ve lately been reading about neurotransmitters and how they bind to sites in specific neurons, instigating depolarization across the membrane of the neuron and allowing for an action potential to communicate to hundreds of thousands of other neurons. This communication between neurons in the central nervous system is relayed into actions in the peripheral nervous system resulting in behavior. But how is this synchronized? What neuron does what? What must be connected to what and why? These are all questions that may take a while to be answered, but we are finding new developments everyday.

In an article from Cornell News, I read about an experiment by James Goodson and Andrew Bass (2000) in which neurotransmitters’ role in the display of sex characteristics in plainfin midshipman fish were examined. In this particular fish, males will make vocal calls through the water that attract females who will come to the site to lay eggs for the vocalizing male to fertilize. However, a second type of male that is unable to make vocal calls waits nearby so that once the eggs are laid, he can get some free-fertilization-action.

Goodson and Bass anesthetized and stimulated the anterior portion of the hypothalamus in each fish to stimulate either a vocal call, or the female’s short grunt (a response to the male’s call). After stimulating normal calls in each fish, the neurotransmitters isotocin and vasotocin (identical to the mammalian oxytocin and vasopressin) were administered to the anterior hypothalamus of each fish. When administered, fish that normally could make calls lost the ability to do so and developed female like grunts, similar to the type II males that could not call but rather grunted like females. This meant that a trait that was typically thought to be controlled by sex (controlled or linked by the gonads) was actually independent, and regulated completely by the brain.

Who knows how many of our traits are linked to gonad development, probably much fewer than we might originally think. If I was given a good dose of estrogen would I not want to play football or wrestle with my best friends?…doubtful (it might just turn into flag football with the Vikes or a pillow fight). At any rate, we shouldn’t be so quick to make judgment calls on biology’s effects in gender behavior.

If you’re still interested in weighing in on whether the academic meetings in San Diego should go on in the wake of fires in Southern California, Terra Sigillata has a thread on that very subject.

I promise the small meeting I’m planning to attend won’t clog up the freeways.

See that little thermometer to the right? It says we’ve met our challenge of raising $20,000 for school kids. However, I actually picked a number of projects that required more money than that, and we still have 3 projects that are not fully funded — and they’re the embryology/developmental biology grants! We’ve got less than a week left, so it would be very nice if people would kick in the last few donations to complete these last few requests.

• A Chicken Is Hatching!!

• Which Came First….The Chicken Or The Egg?

• Embryology in the Classroom

We’re very, very close and time is running out. Let’s get all of the projects fully funded!

So one of the questions on our Neurobiology test due today was to see if there were any heritable diseases in humans that are caused by defects in ion channel genes. I discovered that mutations in the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) gene have been linked to Cystic Fibrosis (CF).

CF is a genetic disease that affects the lungs and digestive system of its victims. The defective CFTR gene produces a thick, sticky mucus that provides an environment for life-threatening pathogens to establish an infection, and can clog the lungs. This unusually thick mucus also interferes with the pancreas, and impairs the enzymes that help to break down food and allow the body to absorb it. The symptoms of CF include frequent lung infections; persistent coughing, oftentimes accompanied by phlegm; wheezing or shortness of breath; poor growth or weight gain, despite a healthy diet and appetite; salty tasting skin; and difficulty in bowel movements or greasy, bulky stools. The incidence is about one thousand new cases a year.

[Read more…]

I am pleased to announce that the Richard Dawkins Foundation has contributed over $2000 to the freethinkers challenge to support science education in American public schools. That brings us close to meeting our goal of $20,000, so we just need a few more of you to sign on.

If you take a look at the leaderboard, you’ll notice that one of the columns lists the dollars donated, but the next column lists the number of donors. We’re again leading the pack, with 152, but I’d really like to be able to say that 200 pharyngula readers were willing to give a few bucks to teachers. 300 would be even better. Donating even a token ten dollars would add up and allow us to say that we godless few could stand up together in our numbers and make a difference.

We’ve had several big donors whose efforts are deeply appreciated. Now lets have everyone else chip in and make those donor numbers spin!

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Europeans, Asians, Africans, Canadians, South Americans, Australians, Central Americans, and you scattered few residents of Antarctica: yes, you can donate! We got instructions from a DonorsChoose representative:

non-citizens living abroad can surely donate. When entering their addresses they simply need to enter their city, country, and post code in the “CITY” field, then select “New York” as their “STATE” and enter five zeroes for their “ZIP CODE”.

Note also I mistakenly said you could donate just a dollar; I was wrong, the minimum donation is $10. I know, there go the poor grad students to whom that is a week’s worth of ramen, but the rest of you can cough up a little bit, right? There are still proposals looking for funding!

Hey, the freethinkers are doing well with the DonorsChoose challenge to support school teachers. We’re still a bit shy of our final goal, so if you want to help show that we godless folk can be charitable, loosen those wallets and kick in a few bucks.

And if you don’t like my chosen proposals, or you’d rather not back an openly and proudly god-free endorsement, browse the leaderboard and pick one of those other sciencebloggers’choices. They’re all good. Maybe not as good as mine, but they’re trying.

UMM recently hosted the University of Minnesota board of regents, and we got a look at the status of the whole U of M system. It’s not a happy story. We have an administration with ambitious goals (that’s good), but they seem to be a bit divorced from reality — they want to turn us into one of the top three public research universities in the world. That sounds like a great 50 year plan, but I’d rather see an ambitious and feasible 5-year goal, myself.

One of my colleagues at the Twin Cities branch campus has analyzed some of the statistics. The most telling one to me is that, despite our goals, our increase in research spending is the least of all of our competitors — we aren’t keeping up. It’s fine to be at the tail end of the pack in a race and plan to pick up your pace to win, but to talk big while slowing down does not give one much confidence.

Here’s a summary of the summary:

Is it really credible to continue on with this “ambitious aspiration” to “become one of the top three public research universities [in the world]?” Let’s admit we have some serious problems here and concentrate on fixing them. Let’s also commit to getting the University of Minnesota at least to the mid-point of the BigTen rankings outlined above. That will be a difficult enough task.

The ultimate problem is declining investment in education, both in higher ed and our source of students, the Minnesota public schools. Rather than touting grand dreams, it might be wiser of our administrators to highlight the deficiencies in the support our government is giving us, and get them to quit taking the UM system for granted.

Oh, and throwing money into stadiums doesn’t seem like the best use of our limited resources.