The NIH Research Festival always has a strong theme running through it, from “Bench-to-Bedside” in 2002 and “Chromosomes in Modern Biology and Medicine” in 2007 to “The NIH at 125: Today's Discoveries, Tomorrow's Cures” in 2012. The year 2014 was no different, but it marked the first time that the Festival was focused on a single organ within the human body: the brain.
These switchboard operators in Building 3 handled the phone calls coming into NIH, connecting incoming callers at a time when each office or laboratory had few phones.
As the international community continues to seek collaborative approaches to contain and eradicate the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa, we are reminded that these efforts are also an investment in our own public health. Only by defeating a virus at its source can we prevent infectious diseases from spreading to other countries.
Let’s start with some numbers: 30,000 neuroscientists, five days, and 20 pages of notes. It all adds up to a week well spent at the recent Society for Neuroscience (SfN) conference in Washington, D.C. Researchers from around the world, many from the NIH IRP, descended on the Washington Convention Center to share their most recent research, discoveries, thoughts, and future ideas.
In Charles Dickens’ 1843 classic, A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by four ghosts who help him to see the error of his ways and embrace a life of service. Scrooge is then able to correct the actions that could have led to his demise. Researchers studying epigenetics take on a similar task.
No need to stand in the cold for a glimpse of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade when you can see it at the NIH Clinical Center! Want to go to space and have a look at the Apollo capsule? It’s here, too. Starting in 2004, the NIH Clinical Center has presented a wonderful annual display of gingerbread houses built by teams of NIH staff.
“Here is an image that is historical because it represents the era (1980s and 1990s) when drug receptors were first being localized in the brain," writes Miles Herkenham, Ph.D.
The turn of the 20th century brought exponential advancements in technology and science. While intrepid explorers like Cook and Peary journeyed over the tundra and ice in search of the North Pole—at that time considered the final frontier of land exploration—the budding National Institutes of Health (NIH) was also journeying into the unknown with a charge to protect the public from organisms existing at the very edges of life.
During my Ph.D., I decided to pursue my thesis project in a lab working in the RNA field and, more specifically, on the mechanisms of alternative splicing regulation. Moving onto my post-doctoral training, I decided to stay in this field mainly because I found it fascinating to work with RNA. It is such a flexible and diverse molecule, but also largely unexplored. I believed that this relatively new area of research would attract more interest among scientists, and the last few years show that I was thinking in the right direction.
This page was last updated on Friday, January 14, 2022
