The day before I left for France, where I would be spending most of the next year, I received a brain. That is, a human brain. I had this brain on order and it arrived in a jar of formaldehyde and I had only 24 hours to decide what to do with it. I am certainly a rational guy, and though I tend to love sci-fi, even the old B movie variety, where a brain is reanimated, or for that matter the Steve Martin Comedy “The Man with Two Brains”, I know that this delivery is just another complex material, which I could test in my material science lab. That it was once the center of operations for a real person is what makes it most interesting though. That there is still so much mystery surrounding an animal organ also makes it intellectually thrilling. The arrival of a brain, which I ordered naively, to do physical testing on it, did leave me with a sense of responsibility. After all, I am so uneducated about the physics of the brain, that unlike the polymer samples that arrive, I didn’t know the “shelf life” of the brain. That is, I didn’t know if it would last until I got back from France. So I was determined to do something with it.
I am far from the first person to want to study the physical mechanics of the brain. In the building where I work, there is a lab which looks at dead neurons with a high powered microscope called an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM), in order to see the physical forces that make up these ever important cell. I had spoken with a professor 6 months ago that did this, because I had read an interesting article in Nature about the topography of the brain, and how the human brain's crumpled structure may explain some high level processing. None of this do I know anything about, other than the occasional article or popular book. But, since I have a physical testing lab at my disposal, I thought that I could look at the physics of these folds in a unique way. It wasn’t the forces of the neuron, like the AFM was measuring, but a macro structure, which involved axons, dendrites, and in a naïve way, just the stickiness of the tissue itself. So I grabbed a grad student, who was used to dissections, and we tore into the brain, and I ran some tests. I am not sure if this is what the poor guy who donated his body to science had in mind, but even though this sounds crude, it was done with utmost respect, and the deep desire to acquire enough data, that I , or someone else could discover something useful from it. I have some of this data, and there is still more to get, so I have real hope that it will be somehow useful.
All of this is not to talk about my results, or my knowledge (or lack thereof of neuro science), but to speak more to method, and how these types of ideas are what makes a life in expiremental science interesting. I have another blog (http://putmanonart.blogspot.com) where I talk about jazz improvising and the comparisons to discoveries in science. In this, my first essay in this new blog series I explore the science alone and a bit more about a very old fashioned idea, the science lab. The lab has in recent years been compared to printed newspapers, libraries and more recently printed books. These all may indeed at one point, in the near future, become nostalgic rather than practical. Technology such as the internet and mobile reading devices, are beginning to make acquiring reading material faster, and more importantly possible, without leaving home. I like a book, and had trouble at first getting used to my Amazon Kindle, but now I love it. The advantage of being able to buy books wherever there is a wifi signal, and read all of them on a single device far outweighs the tactical enjoyment of the printed page. I also assume that the sensory experience of reading on a mobile device will improve. Isn’t this also the same where scientific research is concerned?
In recent years scientists have been able to collaborate at great distances, with some of the best research papers of the last decade being produced by co-authors who have never been in the same lab together. They share data in the way we all share information, via e-mails, and on-line networks. Even more exciting is a kind of free source movement which involves putting technological and scientific challenges out to the world on the internet as a competition. This way thousands (or millions) of amateurs and professionals from around the world can compete to solve the problem, and be rewarded for it. This is enormously democratizing, and could lead to a rapid expansion of knowledge like we have never seen before. This may very well be like the information boom in reading that I just mentioned. That said there is still a need for labs in which experiments can be run, even if they are running at thousands of labs around the world. Perhaps labs can now be like the personal computer, which is a highly sophisticated calculating machine that we all have. A little lab could exist in every home, or office.
At the same time as I speak about this democratizing, miniaturization of experimentations, it seems that large, expensive labs have become extremely important in order to answer some of the big questions of science. The most publicized example of this is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN labs in Switzerland, which is kilometers in size, and costs over a billion dollars. Without this, fundamental questions in physics may remain in the realm of philosophy, or at the very best unproven theory.
So, I want to figure this out and report it in a public way on this blog, by exploring Europe to find the most interesting in laboratory solutions. From the university traditional lab, to the home lab, to the corporate lab, to the multinational funded multibillion dollar lab. I choose Europe simply for it diversity of culture, history, and the amount of labs available. This is not just to see how work is done in these labs, but more interestingly to see how the inquisitive mind can explore ideas. How can an applied physicist cut into a brain the way I did last week? How can a biologist use an off the shelf microscope and a laptop to explore some new phenomena? How can an amateur astronomer still make discoveries, like they have in the past, at a time when they have the Hubble images at their disposal? This will be a fun journey.
