Director's Message
January 1, 2007
Dear members and friends of The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory,
By now, most of you have learned that I will serve as Director of The Picower Institute. Professor Earl Miller will continue as Associate Director.
The new year brings new opportunities and challenges, but the director's responsibility remains the same as it has always been: to provide an exciting, highly collaborative intellectual environment, supported by the infrastructure necessary to make breakthrough discoveries in neuroscience. Thanks to the remarkable efforts of Professor Susumu Tonegawa and the extraordinary philanthropy of Barbara and Jeffry Picower, The Picower Institute has achieved a position of international prominence. Our first collective challenge is to see that this star continues to rise.
MIT has always had distinguished neuroscientists, but viewed from the outside there was little evidence of intellectual cohesion or synergy. The new experiment begun by Susumu was to build a group of faculty around a common theme—how experience modifies the brain—and a cutting edge approach that exploits the tools of molecular biology and genetics to dissect the contributions of specific molecules, synapses, neurons and circuits to behavior. This experiment, culminating in creation of The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, was a smashing success. Our faculty talk to one another, share students and reagents, and collaborate. We are genuinely interested in what our colleagues do, how they can help us, and how we can help them. The Picower Institute "whole" is greater than the sum of the parts—a fact that is readily apparent in the impressive productivity of our faculty. Moreover, many, if not all, of our faculty use, or plan to use, the technology that has become the hallmark of The Picower Institute. This technology of circuit-specific manipulation is no longer restricted to genetic organisms such as flies and mice, but soon will be applicable to primates as well.
I am pleased to say that Susumu Tonegawa will spearhead a new initiative within The Picower Institute, tentatively called the Center for Circuit Genomics. This Center is dedicated to perfecting the technology that will allow us to ask precise questions about how specific cell types and circuits contribute to the experience-dependent modification of neural systems and behavior in both health and disease. Since the time of Cajal, neuroscientists have wondered how myriad neuronal cell types contribute to brain function and dysfunction. The earliest attempts at localization of function within the brain involved, literally, burning a hole or aspirating away a part of the brain, followed by behavioral observations or, more recently, electrophysiological recordings of neuronal activity. We now stand at the threshold of realizing a dream of generations of neuroscientists: to be able to selectively and reversibly inactivate (or activate) specific synapses, cells and circuits within a brain region and then assay the consequences by recording the activity of hundreds, if not thousands of neurons.
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