Gazzaley Makes News Again; UK Judge Bars Would-Be Chemistry Student

UCSF’s resident Brain Man, Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD, director of UCSF Neuroscience Imaging Center and featured guest on Science Café last March, continues to get ink – and with good reason. As more brains begin their slide into the less efficient aging mode, more and more of us rage against our diminished capacity. That list includes the UK’s Guardian/Observer reporter, Phil Hogan, who visited Gazzaley in his Mission Bay offices last year and tested his journalist’s brain in the functional MRI machine that is central to Gazzaley’s neuroscience research. Hogan describes Gazzaley as a “trim, youthful, un-Einstein-like figure in black shirt, jeans and boots, though he does have one of those boards with algebraic squiggles and files labelled ‘EEG’ and ‘ageing’ and a brain on the shelf that gives you a lightning storm when you plug it in. Dr. Gazzaley’s particular interest is ‘the interface between attention and memory,’ the area they call ‘working memory.’” Speaking of working memory, an even more ancient Science Café post from December 2007 mentioned the lawsuit brought by an Iraqi national living in the UK, who was prevented from taking secondary school-level courses in chemistry and human biology because he had suspected terrorist links. A British judge has now ruled that the ban is legitimate, since the courses would put the suspect in a “substantially stronger position” to carry out chemical and biological attacks. As one blogger commented, “Well that’s one way to drive up interest in studying the sciences and address the skill shortage….” And while you might have tired of hearing about Euroscience 2008, here is a short article in Science on the latest meeting in Barcelona.