Opening of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience (TCIN) 2012 Symposium
The Lloyd Building, Trinity College Dublin
Tuesday, 06 November 2012
Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen, Distinguished Guests,
You’re all very welcome to the 2012 symposium of the Trinity College Institute for Neuroscience – TCIN, Ireland’s only dedicated neuroscience research institute.
We welcome particularly our plenary speakers –
- Professor Art Kramer from the Beckmann Institute in the University of Illinois;
- Professor Geraint Rees from UCL; and
- Professor Jeff Dalley from Cambridge
- as well as our own distinguished Trinity speakers from the Institute of Neuroscience and from the CRANN Institute for Nanotechnology.
In a particularly strong symposium today; seven talks and three plenary sessions, highlighting the developing understanding of brain science and its ability to improve human health and quality of life, especially in ageing populations.
Our speakers hail from diverse fields of expertise, ranging from cognitive and behavioural approaches through genetic, cellular and molecular approaches – from many different ‘levels of analysis’ of the core issue, if you like.
TCIN was founded a decade ago, in 2002, as an interdisciplinary research institute with Principal Investigators from a wide range of disciplines, including psychology, physiology, biochemistry, engineering, psychiatry and genetics, among others.
Given its diverse disciplinary origins, it’s no surprise that interdisciplinarity is at the core of TCIN’s research effort. This is true not just of neuroscience but of much of Trinity’s research in general. Our values and our vision have convinced us of the proposition that problems are best solved, and inspiration best gained, by combining strengths across the many disciplines of this multi-disciplinary university, and within disciplines themselves by being ambitious about working across many levels of analysis within our research institutes.
The Neuroscience Institute currently has about 45 academic and clinician-scientist Principal Investigators. Over the past three years, these Principal Investigators have produced over 450 articles in peer-reviewed international journals, and these articles have placed the Institute in the top 0.01% of neuroscience institutes in the world by citations.
We are very proud of this Institute, also for its commitment to raising public awareness of neuroscience. The Institute hosts a public lecture every Tuesday. There isn’t one today because of this symposium, but otherwise through to the end of term, there are lectures on stem cells, neuro-imagining, pain processing and other areas of public interest.
The Institute also works closely with the Science Gallery. In 2009, the Gallery launched METROPOLIS, a virtual Dublin project bringing together computer graphics, engineering and cognitive neuroscience research.
Next year the exhibition RISK LAB will feature experiments that span neuroscience, genetics, and mathematics, and will explore how we determine the probability of everything from a car crash to a coin toss.
ILLUSION will explore the neuroscience and physics of illusion, and investigate how perception underpins how we see, feel, think and understand the world. These exhibitions may someday tour the world as part of Science Gallery International.
Neuroscience is a core research area for Trinity. Another core Trinity research area is Ageing. Six years ago we established the ground-breaking Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing, which we call TILDA. It has put this university at the forefront of cutting-edge research in ageing. TILDA researchers hail from a wide range of disciplines including epidemiology, geriatric medicine, demography, social policy, psychology, economics, and nursing.
Given these core strengths, it’s no surprise to find that ageing is a particular focus for our neuroscience researchers. Ageing is a major theme of this symposium, and it’s a major focus in TCIN’s collaboration with industry partners.
Trinity puts great emphasis on innovation and the commercialisation of research, and neuroscience has proved particularly fruitful in this area. TCIN’s collaboration with Intel and with General Electric has focused on the development of technologies to support independent living in old age, while collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline involves translational research to accelerate the development of novel therapies for Alzheimer’s disease. Through these and other means, TCIN contributes substantially to the public good, showing the effectiveness of universities in advancing human health and welfare.
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The brain and its inscrutable workings remains one of the great frontiers of human knowledge and of medicine. We know so much more than we knew fifty years ago, but nothing like as much as there is to know. True knowledge proceeds in small steps, with occasional “giant steps”, often difficult to recognise at the time.
About forty years ago the English poet, Philip Larkin wrote a terrifying poem about old age, in which he starts off by asking:
“What do they think has happened, the old fools, to make them like this?” and he ends with the flat: “Well, we shall find out.”
That poem tapped into both the universal significance of old age – it happens to most of us and we want it to happen, the alternative being worse – and also into the fear of old age – we don’t know, we can’t know exactly what it will be like, and it can seem remote and frightening.
Academic research helps demystify this fear. Institutions like TCIN, and symposiums like this one, pour light onto the brain’s extraordinary workings - into creativity and also into ageing and mental disorders. In their scholarly way, neuroscientists present their findings, and slowly and subtly change the way people think.
Poets reflect, lead, or encapsulate the sensibilities of their eras. This century a poet may write something equally powerful but less terrified about the end-stage of life. Larkin said of ageing:
“we shall find out”,
meaning of course that we would become old ourselves. But we’re in the process of finding out before we reach that stage. Which in itself is a kind of miracle that has the potential to surprise us.
As researchers, we crave only the space and the investment to keep making discoveries. In yesterday’s Irish Times Professor Jim Heath had strong words to say about possible government cuts to science research. As you all know Heath was on the team that won the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry and he was named by Forbes magazine in 2009 as one of the world’s top seven innovators. He is also on the advisory scientific board of Trinity’s CRANN Institute for Nanotechnology. In his words quoted yesterday:
“Do the science that supports the economy but also the science that is able to surprise.”
TCIN does both with excellence. I congratulate you on that and wish you well in the symposium today.
Thank you
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