Posted by Bobd
(here)
More brain control using light
In San Diego currently brain researchers are meeting and are ga-ga over new techniques to control the brain using light.
SAN DIEGO – Karl Deisseroth is having a very early breakfast before the day gets going at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.
Thirty thousand people who study the brain are at the Convention Center, a small city’s worth of badge-wearing, networking, lecture-attending scientists.
ref:
http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle...256438321.html
For Deisseroth, though, this crowd is a bit like the gang at Cheers — everybody knows his name. He is a Stanford psychiatrist and a neuroscientist, and one of the people most responsible for the development of optogenetics, a technique that allows researchers to turn brain cells on and off with a combination of genetic manipulation and pulses of light.
Cast of Champions
Cori Bargmann of Rockefeller University, who is a leader of a committee at the National Institutes of Health setting priorities for its piece of the brain initiative, said optogenetics is a great example of how technology can foster scientific progress.
“Optogenetics is the most revolutionary thing that has happened in neuroscience in the past couple of decades,” she said. “It is one of the advances that made it seem this is the right time to do a brain initiative.”
At the heart of all optogenetics are proteins called opsins. They are found in human eyes, in microbes and other organisms. When light shines on an opsin, it absorbs a photon and changes.
Deisseroth, 42, who has won numerous prizes and received plenty of news media attention for his work on optogenetics, is quick to point out that there is no sole inventor for this technology.
“It’s not as if one person had a eureka moment,” he said. “The time had come, and it was a question of who had put the resources and effort and people” on the task, and who would get there first.
We can thank Rockefeller University, and the National Institutes of Health to have a new way to program, modify, alter and map the brain.
What does having an OFF switch for the brain mean?
Think about it. A cop can eventually flash a light sequence at your eyes, and instantly you go paralytic. Can't move, drop to the ground frozen. That's the security use not talked about but is the reason funding comes from government sources for this type of research.
Of course the neuroscientists will talk about how well this new technique will let them study epilepsy or some sort of brain issue.. While the funding comes in for dark uses of the technology.
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