Science & Research

[Unspiralled]

Given all of the deleted comments I'm assuming an argument started. That's a shame

The Value of Failure in Science: The Story of Grandmother Cells in Neuroscience - PMC

The annals of science are filled with successes. Only in footnotes do we hear about the failures, the cul-de-sacs, and the forgotten ideas. Failure is how research advances. Yet it hardly features in theoretical perspectives on science. That is a ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

This is a (pretty long) article about the value of failures in science. It uses Grandmother Cells as an illustrative case, so might appeal to those interested in neuroscience.

The paragraph below particularly resonated with me. The “impact” and “relevance” of research is such a key aspect of securing funding and there is a constant pressure to have "successful" outcomes. I do feel that the system doesn't acknowledge that the majority of your work will have absolutely no beneficial impact on society, but it is still essential work in order to make discoveries that could be significant.

It is one thing to say that science fails and that we should think about the decisive role of failures. It is another to highlight the particular aspects of failure that benefit our concrete dealing with science. Different attitudes toward science from the practitioner to the non-expert are the easiest to situate the lack of understanding of failure’s role in the scientific process. Such divergence of attitudes is apparent when it comes to the status of the scientific method. The scientific method is our most popular characterization and explanation for the success of science. But it has limits when it comes to reality. Being a traditional analytical tool and teaching device, it also paints a problematic picture of science because it never makes explicit the ubiquitous presence and influence of failures at the laboratory bench and modeling board (Medarwar, 1959/1999; Firestein, 2015; Schickore, in review).

 

[mcfeez]

I am not a scientist (computer science doesnt count does it?) but do read a fair bit and found this amazing. Saw mention of it on reddit in response to some people who tried to claim some of the newest vaccines developed are gene therapy (?) - so people discussed actual gene therapy. Its incredible.

Gene therapy offers a potential cure to children born without an immune system

An international team of researchers at GOSH and UCLA have developed a gene therapy that successfully treated 48 out of 50 children with a form of severe combined immunodeficiency

www.gosh.nhs.uk

Edit - I did use the V word here but barely haha (just saw the bit of text on the first post). Hope thats alright

 

[Unspiralled]

I did my undergrad in biochem and my PhD in paleoclimatology so these are where my main interests lie. I'd love to learn and understand more about quantum mechanics though because that stuff is spooky.

This particular study I found fascinating as the sample size is huge: 1,789,728 individuals from 814,806 families.

Association Between Risk of COVID-19 in Nonimmune Individuals and Immunity in Family Members

This cohort study examines the spread of COVID-19 infection within family members living in the same residence with different levels of immunity.

jamanetwork.com

Yes that's a really impressive sample size and some really interesting data. I thought this point made in the discussion was particularly interesting and a good example of how research can have a positive impact on society:
"In this study, we found that the benefit of immunity (ie, lowered risk of transmission within families) acquired from a single dose was similar to the benefit of immunity from full vaccination or a previous infection. This knowledge may be particularly valuable for low income countries in which most people are unlikely to receive the vaccines in the near future."

Would definitely be interesting to see any results from a similar study in which delta is the dominant variant.

 

[Prefrontalmedialcortex]

Given all of the deleted comments I'm assuming an argument started. That's a shame

The Value of Failure in Science: The Story of Grandmother Cells in Neuroscience - PMC

The annals of science are filled with successes. Only in footnotes do we hear about the failures, the cul-de-sacs, and the forgotten ideas. Failure is how research advances. Yet it hardly features in theoretical perspectives on science. That is a ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

This is a (pretty long) article about the value of failures in science. It uses Grandmother Cells as an illustrative case, so might appeal to those interested in neuroscience.

The paragraph below particularly resonated with me. The “impact” and “relevance” of research is such a key aspect of securing funding and there is a constant pressure to have "successful" outcomes. I do feel that the system doesn't acknowledge that the majority of your work will have absolutely no beneficial impact on society, but it is still essential work in order to make discoveries that could be significant.

It is one thing to say that science fails and that we should think about the decisive role of failures. It is another to highlight the particular aspects of failure that benefit our concrete dealing with science. Different attitudes toward science from the practitioner to the non-expert are the easiest to situate the lack of understanding of failure’s role in the scientific process. Such divergence of attitudes is apparent when it comes to the status of the scientific method. The scientific method is our most popular characterization and explanation for the success of science. But it has limits when it comes to reality. Being a traditional analytical tool and teaching device, it also paints a problematic picture of science because it never makes explicit the ubiquitous presence and influence of failures at the laboratory bench and modeling board (Medarwar, 1959/1999; Firestein, 2015; Schickore, in review).

What did I miss? Quite a few comments deleted from this morning. Please everyone be nice on here.

@Unspiralled thank you for this article, it was a really thought provoking read and got my brain working hard. This particular point I think is spot on regarding science and research:

“Instead of a hindrance to scientific progress, a frequently overlooked positive characteristic of science is that it inevitably must fail to achieve an important job it sets out to do: discovery.”

Sometimes in research and academia, your hypothesis can fail. I looked further into ‘grandmother cells’ and they are also known as ‘Jennifer Anniston neuron’

“A recent experiment showed that single neurons in people's brains react to the faces of specific people. Researchers see the findings as evidence that our brains use fewer cells to decode a given image than previously thought.”

Jennifer Aniston strikes a nerve - Nature

Single brain cells show selective response to specific celebrity photos.

www.nature.com

 

[Jen667]

Thanks for starting the thread. I shall watch with interest

 

[daydreamer95]

Is there anybody on this thread that knows about how prescriptions and formulary work?

I’ve seen in court case reporting that data has been an issue with gender care for minors that’s the basis of few questions I wanted to ask please

 

[WeepingCassandra]

Thank you!

I don't have time right now for any in-depth discussion but I'd like to kickstart this thread with one of the best titles I've come across in the literature:

Fantastic yeasts and where to find them: the hidden diversity of dimorphic fungal pathogens - PubMed

Dimorphic fungal pathogens are a significant cause of human disease worldwide. Notably, the dimorphic fungal pathogens within the order Onygenales are considered primary pathogens, causing disease in healthy hosts. Current changes in taxonomy are underway due to advances in molecular...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Scientists can sometimes have a sense of humour

Have you seen the Christmas edition of the BMJ? That's always fun. My favourite was the statistical breakdown of the reduction in contents of a Quality Street tin left on an A+E floor on Christmas Eve.

 

[MensaBarbie1985]

Feel free to share anything that is of interest to you!



Such an intersting topic. There must be a lot of hesitation with participation in research due to the sheer amount of misinformation out there! Which areas of psychology/neuro is your initial background in?

i did a lot of really diverse stuff when I first started out but then have been drawn much closer to the psychology of thinking type stuff, particularly in relation to conspiracies, odd beliefs etc, even before all the covid stuff came along! I then worked in medical research management for a number of years but am currently involved in mental health service development so a big change really!

 

[Prefrontalmedialcortex]

I thought that was a really nice accessible paper, as someone who doesn't know a lot about neuroscience.

So if I've understood correctly, then in the taxi drivers the posterior hippocampus is enlarged at the expense of the anterior? So would this mean that taxi drivers aren't so good at whatever the anterior hippocampus' role is compared to the control group? Or is this an oversimplification?

I don’t think it is as clear cut as that. The volume in the posterior hippocampus correlated with the amount of time spent as a taxi driver. It was prominent as it is an area of the brain which taxi drivers rely on for memory. I don’t think this necessarily means their anterior hippocampus is weaker. In their job, they rely a lot on memory and the posterior hippocampus is associated with this.

The brain remains plastic and can adapt to new tasks as seen in these taxi drivers.

 

[MensaBarbie1985]

Thanks for starting the thread. I shall watch with interest

I love reading your responses Jen, you have much thicker skin than I do!

also did you know the definition of ‘crackpot’ is an ‘eccentric or foolish person’

 

[Prefrontalmedialcortex]

It's interesting that in this paper they found the opposite results in blind people.

Patterns of Hippocampal Shape and Volume Differences in Blind Subjects - PMC

Numerous studies in animals and humans have shown that the hippocampus (HP) is involved in spatial navigation and memory. Blind subjects, in particular, must memorize extensive information to compensate for their lack of immediate updating of ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

I've also just skimmed through this paper that was published a few years later by the taxi driver group (sadly I don't think it's open access). They found that the reduced anterior hippocampus volume observed in taxi drivers is correlated with poorer performance in tests measuring the acquisition and retrieval of new visuospatial memories, compared to London bus drivers.

London taxi drivers and bus drivers: a structural MRI and neuropsychological analysis - PubMed

Licensed London taxi drivers show that humans have a remarkable capacity to acquire and use knowledge of a large complex city to navigate within it. Gray matter volume differences in the hippocampus relative to controls have been reported to accompany this expertise. While these gray matter...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

I am surprised they found the opposite of this in blind people. Senses and vision play a huge role so this perhaps accounta for the differences.

I am going to try and find full access to the second article.

 

[Unspiralled]

I’m getting major PhD envy. I am not very familiar with the the field you did your PhD in. What does it entail?

Haha I was sometimes so envious of my friends with proper jobs when I was doing my PhD. It was incredibly tough and lonely at times but I'm glad I persevered. Paleoclimatology is essentially reconstructing prehistoric climates. There are obviously no written records for the majority of Earth's history so we use proxies that have been preserved, which carry climate information e.g. ice cores, speleothems. In my PhD I was analysing the isotopic compositions of various biomarkers found in lake sediments.

 

[Unspiralled]

Thanks for taking the time to explain what Paleoclimatology is and what your PhD was on. Very interesting field of work and one I was not very familiar on at all!

You're very welcome

What are everyone's thoughts on the science that was in the news the other day about Vikings settling in North America years before Columbus got there? I love this interdisciplinary stuff and I find it slightly mind boggling that they've determined an exact year.

https://www.archive.is/oldest/https...tled-north-america-1000-years-ago-solar-storm

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03972-8.pdf

 

[MensaBarbie1985]

Welcome to the thread! I briefly remember you mentioning your background on one of the thread. Yes I think you can call yourself a scientist of sorts I so want to do a PhD but don’t know if I can handle the stress for 3 years. My background is in research/psychology/neuro but I love to learn about many areas of science.

yes that’s before the petty comments started
It will be 6 years for me as I’m doing it alongside work… looking at attitudes towards participation in research and in particular pandemic research, my initial background is also in psychology/neuro

 

[Unspiralled]

Great! Thanks for sharing - will have a read later when I have more time. I haven’t seen you post for a while - hope all is well. The article your shared on your last post (couple of weeks ago) was a very interesting one!

I'm ok thanks, just have stuff going on, such is life. Glad you enjoyed the article!

This is really good to see that this is being studied and could possibly be applied to Alzheimers research. The cognitive neuroscientist who is leading the study is someone I have cited in research for my MSc and have worked with some of his colleagues in the field. Brilliant minds!

That's pretty cool that you have a connection to the PI!

The myelin is something that is damaged in MS - so it made me think whether such therapy would be beneficial to MS sufferers as it reports the myelin being reformed.

That would be very exciting. I'm sure they will do some work looking into this. Always exciting when a new therapy has potential to be used to treat a range of diseases.

 

[Unspiralled]

@Prefrontalmedialcortex - read this a few weeks ago and been meaning to post it ever since.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/11/01/london-taxi-driver-alzheimers-research/

 

[Prefrontalmedialcortex]

No idea, and now it's unclear again whether we can talk about vaccine science

Does that mean I cannot repost the article that talks about syncytin-1? I’m confused again about what is okay and not okay as I don’t know what went down yesterday.

I have always found this research on London taxi drivers really interesting - posterior hippocampi (plays a big role in memory and learning) of taxi drivers were significantly larger when compared to control subjects.

Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers

Structural MRIs of the brains of humans with extensive navigation experience, licensed London taxi drivers, were analyzed and compared with those of control subjects who did not drive taxis. The posterior hippocampi of taxi drivers were significantly larger relative to those of control subjects...

www.pnas.org

 

[Unspiralled]

Does that mean I cannot repost the article that talks about syncytin-1? I’m confused again about what is okay and not okay as I don’t know what went down yesterday.

I have always found this research on London taxi drivers really interesting - posterior hippocampi (plays a big role in memory and learning) of taxi drivers were significantly larger when compared to control subjects.

Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers

Structural MRIs of the brains of humans with extensive navigation experience, licensed London taxi drivers, were analyzed and compared with those of control subjects who did not drive taxis. The posterior hippocampi of taxi drivers were significantly larger relative to those of control subjects...

www.pnas.org

I thought that was a really nice accessible paper, as someone who doesn't know a lot about neuroscience.

So if I've understood correctly, then in the taxi drivers the posterior hippocampus is enlarged at the expense of the anterior? So would this mean that taxi drivers aren't so good at whatever the anterior hippocampus' role is compared to the control group? Or is this an oversimplification?

 

[Unspiralled]

It's interesting that in this paper they found the opposite results in blind people.

Patterns of Hippocampal Shape and Volume Differences in Blind Subjects - PMC

Numerous studies in animals and humans have shown that the hippocampus (HP) is involved in spatial navigation and memory. Blind subjects, in particular, must memorize extensive information to compensate for their lack of immediate updating of ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

I've also just skimmed through this paper that was published a few years later by the taxi driver group (sadly I don't think it's open access). They found that the reduced anterior hippocampus volume observed in taxi drivers is correlated with poorer performance in tests measuring the acquisition and retrieval of new visuospatial memories, compared to London bus drivers.

London taxi drivers and bus drivers: a structural MRI and neuropsychological analysis - PubMed

Licensed London taxi drivers show that humans have a remarkable capacity to acquire and use knowledge of a large complex city to navigate within it. Gray matter volume differences in the hippocampus relative to controls have been reported to accompany this expertise. While these gray matter...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[Prefrontalmedialcortex]

This is a review comparing the Covid virus and influenza. Essentially coronaviruses are quite special because they are one of the few groups of RNA viruses that have a proofreading mechanism during replication.

SARS-CoV-2 and influenza: a comparative overview and treatment implications | Boletín Médico del Hospital Infantil de México

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and Alphainfluenzavirus are RNA viruses that cause coronavirus disease-19 and influenza, resp...

www.bmhim.com

This is a very dense (but fascinating if you like biochem) review paper on the proofreading mechanism.

DEFINE_ME

Thanks so much for sharing! It’s not an area I am particularly knowledgable about but always keen to learn something new.