As described on Monday and hinted at all week, this weekend marks the start of Neuroscience 2009, the annual mega-conference of more than 30,000 neuroscientists. After years of staging the meeting in areas with distractingly nice climates such as New Orleans, Orlando and San Diego, this year should be all business with the rainy chill of Chicago keeping people indoors. But there’s still a lot of fun to be had, with big-time speakers, immersive poster sessions, the never-ending hunt for the best vendor knick-knack giveaway and the night-time socials. Because of Neuroscience’s massive size, there are a million different ways to navigate a path through the science, but here’s a quick extremely long guide to what I’m looking forward to experiencing. Remember to tune in to ScienceLife all weekend (and through Wednesday) for coverage.

Saturday: Magicians Were the First Neuroscientists

Each year one of the most interesting lectures falls under the sober heading of “Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society,” which basically means “we invited someone from outside of neuroscience to talk about neuroscience.” At previous meetings I’ve attended, that meant hearing public figures such as the Dalai Lama and Frank Gehry offering their own perspective on the brain, the mind and thinking - necessary reminders that the microscopic neurons those 30,000 scientists are concentrated on actually add up to some pretty amazing things in practice. 

This year’s Dialogues speakers are neuroscientists of a different sort: magicians Apollo Robbins and Eric Mead. Even though I saw a local version of this talk earlier this year with Robbins and neuroscientist Susana Martinez-Conde (which I wrote about it for the Tribune), I’m excited to see it again, because it really is a neat demonstration of how magicians have used the brain’s limitations to produce convincing illusions. Robbins, whose act is centered on his considerable abilities as a pickpocket, is a master of using diversion to direct a person’s attention one direction while he slips off their watch from another angle. As Robbins and Martinez-Conde explained back in January, this deceptively simple trick actually says a lot about how the brain shifts attention from stimulus to stimulus, and how a normal brain is “tricked” may help us learn about the neurobiological process that underlie an attentional disorder like ADHD. You can watch a video of a similar symposium organized by Martinez-Conde back in 2007 called “The Magic of Consciousness” - which includes Teller of Penn & Teller in a rare speaking role.

Also Saturday: We’re only two weeks away from the University of Chicago’s big Darwin conference, but I still will probably take in at least part of the symposium on Evolution of Brain and Behavior. Harvard’s Elizabeth Spelke caps off the day with a lecture on how the brain processes math - thankfully, it’s scheduled early in the conference, before my own brain will surely grow too tired to handle such a heavy topic.

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For information about the grants that the University of Chicago received as part of the ARRA package, click here.

If the scientists you know have an extra spring in their step today, here’s why: over $5 billion in National Institutes of Health funding was announced this week, the scientific portion of the federal stimulus package passed in the spring. In his January inaugural address, President Barack Obama made researchers’ neck hair stand up when he promised to “restore science to its rightful place,” and this was the first installment of that pledge - a much-needed boost of cash after five years of flat NIH budgets put many laboratories in jeopardy.

“We’re announcing that we’ve awarded $5 billion — that’s with a b — in grants, through the Recovery Act, to conduct cutting-edge research all across America, to unlock treatments to diseases that have long plagued humanity, to save and enrich the lives of people all over the world,” Obama said Wednesday at an NIH event announcing the grants.

A $42 million slice of that $5 billion pie was awarded to the University of Chicago, and I’ve spent the day talking to some of the researchers who snagged the biggest awards. They are all, as you might guess, thrilled to have an infusion of money to help finally launch projects that have languished unfunded or undermanned. In all, more than 100 UChicago researchers shared in the $42 million pot, with grants ranging from $10,000 to $5.6 million. After the jump is some information on the day’s big winners and the projects their new grants will fund.

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This was a busy week for biomedical news. The National Institutes of Health got a new nominee for its director, Francis Collins; the NIH finalized new rules for funding of research on embryonic stem cells; and swine flu got a new quasi-official name: “Pandemic H1N1 2009.”

Of the three events, the naming of Francis Collins as NIH chief may have the biggest long-lasting effects. Pending his confirmation, Collins will take over NIH at a time of rebounding budgets fueled by recovery funds, setting the course for the world’s most powerful research body.

But Collins’ nomination is causing more controversy than I would have thought possible.

I’ve talked with Collins in his prior capacity as director of the Human Genome Project and more recently in connection with his interest in reconciling science and religion. Collins, an evangelical Christian, has drawn heavy criticism from scientific atheists like PZ Myers and our own Jerry Coyne. Myers clearly admires Collins’ organizational skills, but describes him as a “lovable dufus” when it comes to issues of religion and some scientific principles. Coyne says he “can’t help but be a bit worried” about some of Collins’ religious views, including his conviction that the evolution of humans was in some sense inevitable. The psychologist and author Steven Pinker said he has “serious misgivings” about Collins’ appointment, calling him “an advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs.”

Based on my interviews with Collins and reading of his work, most of these criticisms seem unfair.

It’s certainly true that Collins wants to reconcile religion with, for example, evolutionary biology. And this is something that naturalists such as Coyne and Richard Dawkins say cannot be done. But time and again in my lengthy talk with Collins about his book “The Language of God,” he stressed that he’s never thought religion should modify what science shows to be true. “I believe in truth, and I think we shouldn’t be afraid of truth,” he said. “If you believe in God as the creator of the universe, that can hardly be threatened by our efforts to understand how nature works.”

As Chris Wilson wrote this week in Slate, “Most of the time, Collins starts with the science and then reconciles the religion with it.” For a scientist to take issue with this approach seems gratuitous, bordering on intolerant.

On the other hand, like many of the critics I take issue with some of the content on Collins’ website for his BioLogos Foundation. The idea that God affects evolution or other natural processes through unmeasurable influences on quantum events strikes me as a game of three-card Monte - “Oops, you thought God had to act through overt miracles, but actually he was hiding with Heisenberg the whole time. Thanks for playing.”

But even on the BioLogos site, Collins and his crew make some fair points. A section called “God’s Relationship to Time” claims that as creator of the universe, God also would have created time, and would exist in some sense outside of time. This is relevant to the question of divine action, since it raises the possibility that such influence does not consist of supernatural intervention but is part of a larger scheme that was “baked into the cake” of the universe from the start. This seems to me more fundamental than a simple case of three-card monty. It’s a question that thinkers from St. Augustine to Heidegger have grappled with. It certainly doesn’t suggest an “anti-scientific” mindset.

As Wilson notes, for the most part Collins targets issues that seem by definition to be unsolvable by science; he’s not squeezing God into gaps that science has not yet solved, and he’s not challenging any facts that science has revealed. For example, Collins is understandably curious about the origins of life, but he dismisses the idea that because those origins are still murky, they require a divine explanation. When it comes to hard-core biology, Collins does not look for answers in Genesis.

This indicates a species of faith that Collins’ atheist critics share. It’s the faith that the dogged pursuit of empirically solvable questions will lead to answers we can trust, and that most of nature’s interesting mysteries will yield to rational explanations. That’s the sort of faith that should serve an NIH director well.

This announcement from the National Cancer Institute could be very big news at cancer research centers like this one. The increase, which NCI director John E. Niederhuber described in a speech at the meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, will be part of the economic stimulus package.

Here’s an interesting passage from the story in The Scientist:

In 2009 the agency will be able to fund the top 16% of grant applications instead of only the top 12%–last year’s payline–based on budgetary increases alone, Niederhuber said. The NCI may be able to fund 25% of applications with the added $1.3 billion that the agency is set to receive as part of the $10 billion in stimulus funding for the National Institutes of Health. 

But raising the payline is only half the story. “Economic stimulus funds give us the chance to be visionary,” Niederhuber said, adding that the NCI will seek to fund more young, first-time investigators, and will emphasize prevention and early diagnosis in the research it supports in the future. “Patients still need better treatments, better prevention, and better early detection,” he said. “We must recommit ourselves to answering that call.” 

Last Friday the Obama administration published its new guidelines for federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research, ending the Bush-era restrictions on that work.

Except they didn’t end all of the restrictions. The new rules do not allow for work on cells made via research cloning (somatic cell nuclear transfer), and they require an informed consent process that may exclude some cell lines already derived with different consent procedures. Advocates at both antipodes of the stem-cell debate found something to criticize in the Obama rules. Researcher Irv Weissman of Stanford said the rules maintain an “ideological barrier” that will hinder progress, while Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee said the guidelines herald “an incremental strategy to desensitize the public to the concept of killing human embryos for research purposes.”

For now Obama seems to have struck an ideological balance, and some conservatives are giving him credit for it. Yuval Levin, a former Bush bioethics adviser who recently appeared on this blog, wrote on Friday that the new guidelines “certainly could have been worse” from a conservative’s perspective.

At the same time, the new rules mean that federally funded research can move beyond 2001-era technology. Bush’s guidelines, which restricted funds to lines derived before August 2001, allowed researchers to work with just 21 cell lines. Obama’s rules open the door to hundreds of additional lines created since 2001, many of them with genetic defects that can help scientists understand how diseases develop.

In moral terms this may even be a clearer approach than Bush’s policy, which claimed to protect nascent life but did allow some funding of research that required the destruction of human embryos. Those rules allowed fewer stem-cell lines to qualify for funding, yet the restriction was based on an arbitrary cut-off date. Why was it moral to allow funding of research on stem cells taken before August 8, 2001, but beyond the pale to allow funds for cells taken after that date?

Levin, who also served as executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics, wrote that by keeping some limits on stem-cell research funding, Obama’s NIH has conceded “that the destruction of embryos for research is not an innocent and unproblematic practice, but must be constrained for ethical reasons.” So far, so good. As the bioethicist Art Caplan once told me in an interview, “A human embryo may not be a legally protected person, but it’s also not just any old stuff.” Levin then goes further: “These rules raise the question of why limits are necessary, and any serious answer to that question would lead us to conclude that these rules are inadequate. ”

That’s not at all clear to me. Under Bush’s old rules, an embryo’s fate might depend solely on the date when it was created. Under Obama’s new rules, the embryo’s fate is governed by something far less arbitrary - the parents’ intentions, informed by all the options available to them. It seems reasonable to trust that whatever parents decide, they will see their embryos as something more than raw material.

[Note: This post originally contained a quotation from a private classroom setting, which has been removed at the speaker's request.]

Suddenly George W. Bush is no longer the easiest target for anyone frustrated at the pace of scientific progress.

He started to occupy that position at 9 p.m. Eastern time on Aug. 9, 2001, when he went on national television to outline restrictions on federal funding for the new field of embryonic stem cell research. It seemed an arbitrary and even arrogant policy. No federal funds could be used for research on cell lines derived after the moment Bush began his speech - exactly 9:00:00 p.m. He portrayed the decision as a compromise - the original intention was to give no funds at all - but many researchers saw it as a fiat that would stifle a promising field and send a message that scientists served at the pleasure of the president. Science-related decisions in subsequent years tended to bear out that early impression.

Now there’s no obvious scapegoat for the obstacles facing researchers and patients eager for new treatments. President Obama has pledged to lift Bush’s restrictions on stem cell research, and to “put science back in its rightful place.” But we still don’t have a good sense of what that means.

This could be a rare opportunity to make a new strategy for American biomedical research. It would be a massive undertaking, centered on the sprawling National Institutes of Health, which currently lacks a permanent director. The $28 billion NIH budget supports 27 centers and institutes, and an army of researchers around the country.

A blog post last week by Stanford researcher Stephen Quake suggested that this is “the time to rethink the basic foundations of how science is funded.”  He proposed more long-term grants to scientists and better incentives to pursue creative projects. The current system has some incentives for researchers to follow the agencies’ institutional priorities, rather than give reign to their best ideas.

My op-ed last Monday in the Chicago Tribune suggested creating a new NIH institute devoted to stem cell research. Yet some of the response to that piece reflected a widespread wariness of doing anything to complicate the federal research bureaucracy. My e-mail friend Yuval Levin, a National Review writer who worked in Bush’s domestic policy office, said that if anything the NIH needs a simpler management structure, not more institutes. He echoed Quake’s point that the current system doesn’t do enough to support younger investigators or new ideas.

In the short run, how Obama handles the NIH may be a better test of his managerial success than the outcome of the stimulus plan. It’s one thing to sign a piece of paper and reverse Bush’s stem-cell policy; it would be a much greater feat to free the awesome creativity of America’s scientists.