統合脳ニュース 2008年夏のワークショップ "New Technologies in Neuronal Imaging and Manipulation" 印象記　　　 〜来日講演者から見て〜

札幌で行われた班会議の間、気候はすばらしく、連日の晴天、そして暑すぎず寒すぎず、空気は乾いていて、気持ちがよい。近くの大通り公園では、土日になると、昼間からビアガーデンが店をだしていて、お客が昼間から酔っ払っている。そのすぐ横を子供たちが滑り台で夜中まで遊び狂っている。まるっきり別世界のようである。私が住んでいるアメリカのノースカロライナは、札幌よりはるかに田舎ではあるが、公衆の面前で酒を飲めないし、子供から目を離すわけにはいかないからして、この平和な世界が大都会の真ん中にあるというのは、まったく持って不思議な感じがする。そして、やはりアメリカの味の砂漠（！）からやってきたものとしては、食事のおいしさに感動。夏は、やっぱり札幌だね！
　さて、そんなよいところに招待してくださったオーガナイザーの方々に感謝しつつ、ワークショップの感想となる。今回のワークショップのタイトルも"New Technologies in Neuronal Imaging and Manipulation"ということで、神経の可視化、操作技術に関するものとなった。私が最初にシナプスでの分子活性の可視化技術の話をしたあと、Wang 博士(NIH)によるin vivoでのArcの発現を可視化することにより神経の活性の解析に成功した話し、 Ohki博士(Harvard)によるカルシウムイメージングを使った大脳視覚領域の解析の話をして、午前中が終了。午後は、Kerr博士 (Janelia)による新しい光学セクションの線虫への応用について、 Caraway 博士(Salk)によりシナプス結合している神経をIdentifyする新しい手法について、 Boyden 博士(MIT)による光感受性のチャンネルおよびポンプによる神経の活性制御による話という内容となった。これらの講演からも、光学的な手法が、比較的非侵襲的で、時間空間分解能が望めるという特性のために、シナプスや神経回路の解析には欠かせないツールとなってきていることがわかる。また、この手法のための、遺伝子的な蛍光プローブの発展も目覚しく、今後のさらなる神経回路や機能解析への応用が期待できる。講演者は、最近ラボを始めたか、これから始めるという若手が中心で、未発表データも多く、楽しめる内容だった。さらに、質疑応答が活発で、いわゆる“よい質問”も多く、分野の盛り上がりを感じるとともに、活気のある素晴らしい会議だったと思う。
　そして、会議のあとの懇親会も楽しみの１つ。食事の質と量は、素晴らしいの一言！学生やポスドクなど、これからキャリアを作る人たちは、こういう講演者と話す機会を大事にするとよいと思う。いわゆるコネつくり、というか。だいたい、こういうときは、講演者たちのほうも、そういうことを期待しているので、気軽に話してくれるはず。今回では、そういう意味では、若い人たちが全体的に消極的な気もした。全体的に、素晴らしいワークショップだったと思う。最後に、もう一度オーガナイザーの方々に感謝する。

When I was invited by Ikue Mori to speak at the IBR2008 symposium, I expected the meeting to be much like the dozens of other neuroscience meetings that I've attended. For the most part, this was true: although I was unable to fully appreciate the sessions presented in Japanese, the science appeared to be addressing the latest issues in the field, and the location was pleasant, especially in contrast to the heat of Tokyo and especially Nagoya in early August. But there were two aspects of the meeting that came as pleasant surprises.

My lab is at the Janelia Farm Research Campus, which is a non-profit neuroscience research institute funded entirely by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. For decades, HHMI has been funding the best biological researchers in the U.S., and as such, when an event is associated with HHMI, it tends to attract attention. Therefore, at Janelia Farm, I've had the pleasure of attending conferences with some of the best and brightest researchers from the U.S. and around the world. I was pleased to note that the invited speakers to IBR2008 included a number of speakers who had come to Janelia. I was also pleased to find the level of scientific discourse at IBR2008 to be of the same high quality to which I am accustomed. I should not say that this was a surprise, as I had expected a high scientific quality, but I was glad that I was not disappointed.

The true surprise for me was the questions. At most conferences I've been to, a talk scheduled for an hour will have at most ten minutes devoted to questions. When I received the instructions for the IBR2008 symposium, however, I was very surprised to see that only 35 minutes was set aside for the talk, and 25 minutes were devoted to questions. Could this actually work, I wondered? Would people be willing to ask so many questions? Would the questions be interesting, or would they grow dull and repetitive just to fill up time? I was pleased to discover that the questions were insightful and probing, and that the twenty-five minutes of questions and discussion were even more enlightening than the lectures themselves. This is, I think, a key aspect of science that is too often shortchanged in the U.S.: the exchange of ideas-not just the delivery of ideas from a speaker to the audience-and a frank and detailed discussion of problems and drawbacks of various methods. I was delighted by the engaging question sessions after each talk in the English sessions. I assume that I would have been equally delighted by the Japanese sessions if I knew Japanese.

My talk, I thought, might make it especially difficult for people to ask good questions. My research involves developing advanced microscopy tools to enable monitoring of the activity of the whole C. elegans brain. This is a departure from a normal neuroscience talk in two ways. First, vertebrate neuroscience is by far the most popular. We are vertebrates, so this is understandable. But as an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, I learned in my physics classes the incredible value of working on simplified systems. If you want to understand how molecules work, you don't start with cholesterol (although it is a fascinating and important molecule). You start with a hydrogen molecule: just two protons and two electrons, a simple system in which you can work out some of the fundamental principles by which molecules, groups of atoms, behave differently than isolated ones. To me, C. elegans is the hydrogen molecule of the neuroscience world: 302 neurons, with a well-known pattern of connectivity, and a variety of simple yet interesting behaviors, including simple forms of short-term and long-term learning. This, it seems to me, is one of the best systems to study if one wants to uncover some of the basic principles of how networks of neurons function differently than isolated ones.