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McGovern Institute Scolnick Prize awarded to David Julius

Anne Trafton |

The McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT announced today that David Julius, a physiologist at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), will be the 2007 recipient of the Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience. The Scolnick prize is awarded each year by the McGovern Institute to recognize an individual who has made outstanding advances in the field of neuroscience. Dr. Julius, who a is a professor and vice chair of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at USCF, receives the 2007 prize for his discovery of the molecular receptors for temperature and inflammatory pain.

“David Julius has transformed our understanding of temperature perception and pain”, says McGovern Institute director Robert Desimone. “His work is of great importance for basic neuroscience and medicine, and we are very pleased to honor his groundbreaking contributions through this award.”

It has been known for many years that capsaicin, the substance that gives chili peppers their hot taste, interacts specifically with pain sensitive neurons. Building on this observation in a landmark 1997 paper, Dr. Julius was able to identify the molecular receptor for capsaicin and to demonstrate that it is specifically expressed in a subset of sensory neurons, now recognized as key components of the pain pathway. He also showed that the receptor, known as TRPV1, is a heat-sensitive ion channel, with a temperature threshold that corresponds with the point at which we start to perceive warm stimuli as painful.

Dr. Julius has continued to study TRPV1 and related channels, and in more recent work has identified the receptor for menthol, a plant-derived substance that produces a cooling sensation. He showed that the menthol receptor responds to cold temperatures, thereby proving that the TRP family of ion channels constitutes the fundamental mechanism for temperature sensation in mammals.

In addition to explaining how we perceive temperature, Dr. Julius has made major contributions to our understanding of pain. By showing that TRP ion channels are activated by a variety of chemicals that are released by inflamed tissue, as well as noxious chemical agents such as spider toxins and mustard oils, Dr. Julius has established these channels as polymodal receptors that allow us to detect, through pain, the presence of inflammation or injury as well as extremes of temperature. His work has had a great impact not only in basic neuroscience but also in the pharmaceutical industry, where TRP channels have emerged as important potential targets for the development of novel analgesic drugs.

The McGovern Institute will award the Scolnick Prize to Dr. Julius on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 4:00 pm. Dr. Julius will deliver a lecture entitled “From Peppers to Peppermints: Natural Products as Probes of the Pain Pathway”, followed by a reception, at the McGovern Institute in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex, 43 Vassar Street (building 46, room 3002) in Cambridge. The event is free and open to the public.

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About the Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience

The Scolnick Prize, awarded annually by the McGovern Institute, is named in honor of Dr. Edward M. Scolnick who stepped down as President of Merck Research Laboratories in December 2002, after holding Merck’s top research post for 17 years. Dr Scolnick is now an associate member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and also serves as a member of the McGovern Institute’s governing board. The prize, which is endowed through a gift from Merck to the McGovern Institute, consists of a $50,000 award, plus an inscribed gift and is given each year to one recipient.

About the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT

The McGovern Institute is a research and teaching institute committed to advancing human understanding and communications. The goal of the McGovern Institute is to investigate and ultimately understand the biological basis of all higher brain function in humans. The McGovern Institute conducts integrated research in neuroscience, genetic and cellular neurobiology, cognitive science, computation, and related areas.

By determining how the brain works, from the level of gene expression in individual neurons to the interrelationships between complex neural networks, the McGovern Institute’s efforts work to improve human health, discover the basis of learning and recognition, and enhance education and communication. The McGovern Institute contributes to the most basic knowledge of the fundamental mysteries of human awareness, decisions, and actions.

For additional information, please go to http://web.mit.edu/mcgovern.

McGovern Institute Presents 3rd Annual Scolnick Prize Lecture to Michael Greenberg

Anne Trafton |

April 11, 2006–The McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT will present the third annual Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience on April 25, 2006 to Dr. Michael Greenberg, a leading researcher at Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School and a world leader in molecular neurobiology. Dr. Greenberg will present a public lecture entitled “Signaling Networks that Control Synapse Development and Cognitive Function” from 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., followed by reception, at the McGovern Institute in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex, 43 Vassar Street (building 46) in Cambridge. The event is free and open to the public.

Dr. Greenberg directs the Program in Neurobiology within the Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School Department of Neurology. He is widely regarded as a world leader in molecular neurobiology and has made seminal discoveries that have resulted in entirely new avenues of investigation in neural development, the neural response to injury and disease, and the search for new treatments for neurological disorders and brain injuries.

“Many laboratories worldwide are pursuing new leads based on the discoveries Dr. Greenberg has made regarding signaling pathways in neurons and their response to growth factors and neurotransmitters.”

“Dr. Greenberg exemplifies the intersection of basic neuroscience research with areas of clinical importance, which will clearly impact the effort to alleviate the human suffering brought on by brain diseases,” said Dr. Robert Desimone, Director of the McGovern Institute. “Many laboratories worldwide are pursuing new leads based on the discoveries Dr. Greenberg has made regarding signaling pathways in neurons and their response to growth factors and neurotransmitters.” These signaling pathways help regulate the development and function of the nervous system, including axon guidance, cell fate determination, synaptic development, and neuronal survival within the developing and adult nervous system.

The Scolnick Prize, awarded annually by the McGovern Institute, provides an important focus for the international neuroscience community, calling attention to the best new approaches to understanding the brain.

“I am honored to be selected for the Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience,” said Dr. Greenberg. “It is especially meaningful to me because much of my research on signaling mechanisms that control nervous system development was inspired early on by approaches that Dr. Scolnick developed for studying signaling pathways that regulate cell proliferation and cancer development.”

The Scolnick Prize is named in honor of Dr. Edward M. Scolnick, who stepped down as President of Merck Research Laboratories in December 2002, after holding Merck & Co., Inc.’s top research post for 17 years. It was established through a grant from The Merck Company Foundation to the McGovern Institute and consists of an award of $50,000 given each year to one recipient who is an outstanding leader in the international neuroscience research community.

About the McGovern Institute at MIT

The McGovern Institute at MIT is a neuroscience research institute committed to improving human welfare and advancing communications. Led by a team of world-renowned, multi-disciplinary neuroscientists, The McGovern Institute was established in February 2000 by Lore Harp McGovern and Patrick J. McGovern to meet one of the great challenges of modern science – the development of a deep understanding of thought and emotion in terms of their realization in the human brain. Additional information is available at: http://web.mit.edu/mcgovern/.

Faces have a special place in the brain

by Cathryn Delude |

Are you tempted to trade in last year’s digital camera for a newer model with even more megapixels? Researchers who make images of the human brain have the same obsession with increasing their pixel count, which increases the sharpness (or “spatial resolution”) of their images. And improvements in spatial resolution are happening as fast in brain imaging research as they are in digital camera technology.

Nancy Kanwisher, Rebecca Frye Schwarzlose and Christopher Baker at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT are now using their higher-resolution scans to produce much more detailed images of the brain than were possible just a couple years ago. Just as “hi-def” TV shows clearer views of a football game, these finely grained images are providing new answers to some very old questions in brain research.

One such question hinges on whether the brain is comprised of highly specialized parts, each optimized to conduct a single, very specific function. Or is it instead a general-purpose device that handles many tasks but specializes in none?

Using the higher-resolution scans, the Kanwisher team now provides some of the strongest evidence ever reported for extreme specialization. Their study appeared in the Nov. 23 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

The study focuses on face recognition, long considered an example of brain specialization. In the 1990s, researchers including Kanwisher identified a region known as the fusiform face area (FFA) as a potential brain center for face recognition. They pointed to evidence from brain-imaging experiments, and to the fact that people with damage to this brain region cannot recognize faces, even those of their family and closest friends.

However, more recent brain-imaging experiments have challenged this claimed specialization by showing that this region also responds strongly when people see images of bodies and body parts, not just faces. The new study now answers this challenge and supports the original specialization theory.

Schwarzlose suspected that the strong response of the face area to both faces and bodies might result from the blurring together of two distinct but neighboring brain regions that are too close together to distinguish at standard scanning resolutions.

To test this idea, Schwarzlose and her colleagues increased the resolution of their images (like increasing the megapixels on a digital camera) ten-fold to get sharper images of brain function. Indeed, at this higher resolution they could clearly distinguish two neighboring regions. One was primarily active when people saw faces (not bodies), and the other when people saw bodies (not faces).

This finding supports the original claim that the face area is in fact dedicated exclusively to face processing. The results further demonstrate a similar degree of specialization for the new “body region” next door.

The team’s new discovery highlights the importance of improved spatial resolution in studying the structure of the human brain. Just as a higher megapixel digital camera can show greater detail, new brain imaging methods are revealing the finer-grained structure of the human brain. Schwarzlose and her colleagues plan to use the new scanning methods to look for even finer levels of organization within the newly distinguished face and body areas. They also want to figure out how and why the brain regions for faces and bodies land next to each other in the first place.

Kanwisher is the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience. Her colleagues on this work are Schwarzlose, a graduate student in brain and cognitive sciences, and Baker, a postdoctoral researcher in the department.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Center for Research Resources, the Mind Institute, and the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

Tod Machover at the McGovern Institute Opening Ceremony

Anne Trafton |

Tod Machover, an influential composer and the head of the Media Lab’s Opera of the Future group, has been praised for creating music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries. In this video, filmed at the McGovern Institute Opening Ceremony, Machover introduces a musical score — incorporating neural imagery and sound — that he composed specifically for the event.

McGovern Institute to present inaugural Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience Research

Anne Trafton |

The Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience Research will be awarded on Friday April 23rd at the McGovern Institute at MIT, a leading research and teaching institute committed to advancing understanding of the human mind and communications. According to Dr. Phillip A. Sharp, Director of the Institute, this annual research prize will recognize outstanding discoveries or significant advances in the field of neuroscience.

The inaugural prize will be presented to Dr. Masakazu Konishi, Bing Professor of Behavioral Biology at the California Institute of Technology. As part of the day’s events, Dr. Konishi will present a free public lecture, “Non-linear steps to high stimulus selectivity in different sensory systems” at 1:30 PM on Friday, April 23rd at MIT (building E25, room 111.) Following the lecture, The McGovern Institute is hosting an invitation-only reception and dinner honoring Dr. Konishi at the MIT Faculty Club. Speakers for the evening award presentation include: Dr. Sharp; Patrick J. McGovern, Founder and Chairman of International Data Group (IDG) and trustee of MIT and the Institute; Edward Scolnick, former President of Merck Research Laboratories; and Torsten Wiesel, President Emeritus of Rockefeller University.

“I am pleased, on behalf of the McGovern Institute, to recognize the important work that Dr. Mark Konishi is doing,” said Dr. Sharp. “Dr. Konishi is being recognized for his fundamental discoveries concerning mechanisms in the brain for sound location such as a neural topographic map of auditory space. Through a combination of his discoveries, the positive influence of his rigorous approach, and the cadre of young scientists he has mentored and trained, Dr. Konishi has improved our knowledge of how the brain works, and the future of neuroscience research. Mark is truly a leader, and well-deserving of this prestigious honor.”

Dr. Konishi received his B.S and M.S degrees from Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan and his Doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 1963. After holding positions at the University of Tubingen and the Max-Planck Institute in Germany, Dr. Konishi returned to the United States, where he worked at the University of Wisconsin and Princeton University before coming to the California Institute of Technology in 1975 as Professor of Biology. He has been the Bing Professor of Behavioral Biology at Caltech since 1980. With scores of publications dating back to 1971, and as the recipient of fourteen previous awards, Dr. Konishi has forged a deserved reputation as an outstanding investigator.

Among his many findings, Dr. Konishi is known for his fundamental discoveries concerning sound location by the barn owl and the song system in the bird. He discovered that in the inferior colliculus of the brain of the barn owl there is a map of auditory space and he identified the computational principles and the neural mechanisms that underlie the workings of the map.

The creation of the Edward M. Scolnick Prize was announced last year, with the first presentation scheduled for 2004. The annual prize consists of an award equal to $50,000 and will be given each year to an outstanding leader in the international neuroscience research community. The McGovern Institute will host a public lecture by Dr. Konishi in the spring of 2004, followed by an award presentation ceremony.

The award is named in honor of Dr. Edward M. Scolnick, who stepped down as President of Merck Research Laboratories in December 2002, after holding Merck & Co., Inc.’s top research post for 17 years. During his tenure, Dr. Scolnick led the discovery, development and introduction of 29 new medicines and vaccines. While many of the medicines and vaccines have contributed to improving patient health, some have revolutionized the ways in which certain diseases are treated.

About the McGovern Institute at MIT

The McGovern Institute at MIT is a research and teaching institute committed to advancing human understanding and communications. The goal of the McGovern Institute is to investigate and ultimately understand the biological basis of all higher brain function in humans. The McGovern Institute conducts integrated research in neuroscience, genetic and cellular neurobiology, cognitive science, computation, and related areas.

By determining how the brain works, from the level of gene expression in individual neurons to the interrelationships between complex neural networks, the McGovern Institute’s efforts work to improve human health, discover the basis of learning and recognition, and enhance education and communication. The McGovern Institute contributes to the most basic knowledge of the fundamental mysteries of human awareness, decisions, and actions.