I am going to give a talk on cell consciousness at a graduate conference in Cambridge called “Challenges of the 21st Century”. The purpose of this conference is to discuss issues which matter to people in the 21st Century with students from different disciplines. Therefore I am expected to explain how my work on cell consciousness would address the problems which people are facing day in and day out.

This is not going to be easy, I felt, after reading an article on Times by Jeremy Clarkson from TopGear. He said:

”...So you might imagine that all of the world’s scientists are currently in their bunkers, desperately trying to figure out why the world is running out of food all of a sudden and, more importantly, what can be done.

And now, it seems, the world’s boffins have got more important things on their enormous minds. Last week, for instance, as the fires in Haiti burnt, a group of eggheads at Yale University announced that after some exhaustive research, they’d proved women who eat chocolate five times a week are 40% less likely to get preeclampsia than those who indulge only once a week. “

Of course everybody is like that. A few years ago BBC radio 4 broadcasted a programme called “WHAT REMAINS TO BE DISCOVERED?” and they discussed the problem of consciousness. One of the questions they considered I think particularly relevant to general public is: “Why do so many of us hope that we are more than simply wonderful machines? ”. Of course we don’t think of it everyday, but this question pops up every now and then in different forms.

The debate on abortion is one such thing. We know that embryos are alive however young they are, but some claim that terminating them is ethical as long as it is before they become conscious. Then this argument would lead us to a tricky question: Is it unethical to kill animals which are conscious? If so, where would we set the boundary between “conscious” or “unconscious”? I do not believe that such boundary actually exists and I am trying to prove that by demonstrating the possibility of consciousness in cells.

I would appreciate your valuable opinions on this, and I will incorporate them in my presentation whenever possible. Many thanks in advance.

I have just obtained a copy of “Blood Music” by Greg Bear which was recommended by Henry. In this book, Virgil Ulam, a molecular biologist, develops “intelligent cellular matter”. The company he works for orders to destroy it, but he manages to smuggle it by injecting it into his body.

It is an old book (published in 1985) and the way Virgil created the intelligent cells did not sound very convincing to me, but it has been an interesting read so far. In this book, the author sort of defines cell consciousness in bacteria: ”...the cells developed their own memory and the ability to process and act upon environmental information”. In the end, Virgil manages to train lymphocytes to ”interact as much as possible with each other and with their environment – a much more complex miniature glass maze”

I don’t think lymphocytes would ever learn how to navigate themselves through a maze, but I agree with the idea that conscious cellular matter should be able to perceive and interpret external environmental information and respond to it. It will also need a memory storage, because otherwise all it can do will be reflex.

Later in the book Virgil’s mother asks him a question: ”Are they friendly?...If they can think, then they feel something…”. Umm, good question. I will answer that next time.

ASSC2008 (Association for the Scientific Studies of Consciousness) will be held in Taiwan this June. I have submitted my poster abstract, but still not entirely sure if I should go or not, so I decided to go through other poster abstracts and think if I would benefit from the meeting.

Anil Seth has a presentation entitled “Measuring Consciousness”. In the abstract he stated “Presently, behavioral and brain-based measures tend to pick up on different aspects of consciousness: Brain-based measures are especially suited for measuring conscious level, whereas behavioral measures are mostly used for assessing which contents are conscious. Therefore, an integrative approach combining in single studies both types of measures encourages a virtuous circularity in which putative measures and theoretical advances mutually inform, validate, and refine one another”

This is a fair point and certainly applicable to cell consciousness too. Namely measuring intracellular molecules, such as calcium or ATP, can tell the level of cellular activity, but not useful to predict cellular behaviours. On the other hand, watching cell morphology or migration can directly indicate cellular behaviours.

In another abstract, Kinouchi et al proposed “A Model of Consciousness and Self Based on Simple Abstracted Brain-Like Neural Network System”. This is a version of Global Workplace Theory, but emphasize self-recursive perception. Namely the system observe its own emotion and it will avoid “unpleasant” experience and continue “pleasant” experience. As for cells, they do know what is stressful and respond to it, but I am not sure if cells can feel pleasure. It is worth thinking of.

At the end of the day, I am still not sure if I should go to the meeting or not. I would appreciate if you could give me more time and of course any suggestions are most welcome!

I have decided to change the title of this blog to “conscious cells”. Under this I will discuss how we can study apparently complex behaviours of cells from cognitive science perspective.

Some of you in UK may already know that HEFCE proposed a new way to assess and fund research in UK. One of the biggest changes is that they want to use the actual number of citations of each article rather than the impact factor of the publishing journal to measure the impact of the work. According to the research carried out by Leiden University, a paper with three times or more citation than average can be considered as “excellent performance in international perspective”. Because an average biomedical paper is roughly cited 10 times, your publication should be cited 30 times or more to be considered “excellent”.

Although I understand why HEFCE is proposing, I am extremely concerned that a young PI like me would suffer significantly in the next RAE. It will take five to ten years to access the citation impact of each article and I have few publications which would date back that far. Also I feel pressure that I have to publish articles which are likely to be cited quickly. Such articles are perhaps co-authored by well-known senior researchers and in pace with current trends of the field, while my desire is to cultivate a new field of research from scratch without influence from seniors. Maybe I am a bit naïve and over-ambitious but I am feeling that artificial metrics like this is going to suffocate my research.

In Japan we have ongoing debates on how much doctors should be paid. Currently physicians are paid about 40000-80000GBP per year, unsurprisingly well above the national average wage. This has apparently upset some Japanese including Treasury who decided to cut the health budget for this year so that the doctors’ wage will be closer to the national average. The union for physicians disagrees, claiming that their wages are not overly high considering that they work much longer than average workers and always have risks of lawsuit when things go wrong. Besides most of public hospitals are in red and facing financial catastrophe.

When I discuss this issue with others, I often struggle to explain what is the “right” wage for a profession. Perhaps everybody (except for doctors) would be happy if they get paid the national average, but then the public will have no right to complain if the doctors refuse to work more than the national average. Considering the number of doctors and hospitals in Japan, the healthcare system will collapse if doctors work only 40 hrs a week.

The problem, perhaps, is that it is unclear who should determine the salary for doctors. One argument would be it should be the public whose money funds the healthcare. So maybe Japanese should have a referendum to determine the salary. If that is so, however, salaries for other public sectors, even Prime Minister’s, should be voted by the public. I know it is not going to happen soon, but at least I can try it on the web…

Perhaps one of the biggest scientific news stories this week is the racial remark by James Watson, who (apparently) cancelled his UK tour and now went home. I was about to see him at Cambridge later this month, but it looks like that is not going to happen. So perhaps I shall at least browse his new book “Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science”, which he was supposed to promote in UK.

Although I have read some of his books previously, I never learned a really useful lesson from them. It is difficult for me to take them seriously because I have been told that he often makes stories up. Moreover, his advice in the books, such as “take risks”, is mostly shallow and only reasonably meaningful because it was said by a very famous scientist.

Then, now his racial outburst. It was not surprising to me since he said something like that before. However, this scandal reminds me of a lesson, which is perhaps more important than anything else he says in the new book. Scientific research is funded by public who believe one day it will transform their life. Therefore scientists particularly if they are well known, have intellectual responsibility to hold up the right scientific attitude which is firmly based on evidence rather than prejudice or guess. Since he is suspended by CSHL, Dr. Watson can perhaps set up a research institute which is fully funded by his own earning so that he can learn how much he owe his success to the support from public who he has just offended in the most revolting manner.

I suppose everyone has one or two guilty presures and, for me it is Ig nobel. I have to admit I absolutely love it, because it demonstrates in a funny way the importance of looking things differently and give it a go if you find it interesting. Besides I think many of the prize winners are fairly good researchers. One of this year’s winner investigated the side effects of sword swallowing, which appeared in a respectable medical journal BMJ. Another this year’s winner is a study on how Viagra can help the recovery from Jet lag in hamsters. This is also a serious stuff and the result was even covered by Times (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article1821279.ece).

I was pleased to know that one of the prize winner was Japanese, and Japanese newspapers gave fair amount of coverage to it. Let me quote a passage from Science.

“Ice cream may never be the same now that Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan has discovered how to extract vanillin, the essence of vanilla flavor, from cow dung. Don’t pooh-pooh Yamamoto’s accomplishment. It may not win her a Nobel Prize, but it has netted her an honor equally exclusive. “

According to a Japanese newspaper, such technology is possible because vanilla is extracted from plants which cows eat. Although she admits that vanilla extracted from her method may not be suitable for ice cream, it can be an inspiration for chemists who are working on renewable resources.

When I came to UK to study for my master degree, I spent a few months in a language centre in Manchester. There were people from virtually everywhere, and I quickly noticed that their attitudes to the use of English were slightly different from each other. I and my Japanese friends had a sort of agreement that we would never use Japanese in or out of classes, to make sure we completely immersed ourselves in the English-speaking environment. At first I thought it was a bit strange and rather pointless, because our accents were so strong that we still sounded much more like Japanese than English.

On the other hand, students from some other countries in the centre did not seem to be against using speaking their native languages even when there were people who did not speak them. I was OK with that, but later I was told that some of them were actually openly abusing me everytime when I was having breakfast with them in our student accomodation. Although it was quite shocking, I let them carry on because if they didn’t do so in front of me, they would still have done that elsewhere.

Several years passed and now I live in Cambridge, which has a large population of Japanese researchers. I normally talk to them in Japanese when we go out together, but I do speak in English when non-Japanese speakers are coming with us. Nevertheless, some locals don’t like that and occationally they verbally (or even physically) attack us saying things like “speak English!”.

Experiences like these make me think if I should have a certain rule on how we use our native languages in my lab. In her book “At The Helm”, Kathy Barker suggests lab members should only use English in the lab and perhaps many people agree with her. However, it would be quite unrealistic to do so if you have a lab which is located in Japan and has, say, 8 Japanese and 3 British. Besides, using the same language does not necessarily help because those with poorer English proficiency can easily be left out of conversation. My feeling is that we should respect the fact that people from different countries have communication barriers which cannot be overcome by simply speaking the same language. Breaking such barrieres will probably need conscious efforts from lab members as well as from the P.I..I would appreciate comments from anyone who are conducting such efforts, but in the meantime, I shall stick to, eh, Japanese in my Japanese-only lab…

I am in Edinburgh to attend a UK neuroinformatics workshop. Perhaps one could argue that neuroscience is one of the few biological disciplines where theoretical biology can play significant roles. Here I intentionally avoided the word “theoretical biologists” because they are not necessarily the people who come up with the great theories in neuroscience. One famous example is Hodgkin-Huxley equation which are developed by experimental biologists who also knew enough mathematics and computing to come up with the mathematical model. Today significant number of experimental neuroscientists have done some modelling or interested in doing it.

Therefore, it should be reasonably straightforward to organise collaborative activities between experimental and theoretical neuroscientists and set up databases and computational tools for sharing and disseminating experimental data. Didn’t look like that, I am afraid, from what I have heard from this workshop. In bioinformatics there have been the data, such as genome sequence, protein structure, or microarray data which nearly everybody thinks are important and clearly require informatics for efficient analysis. I am not sure if we can agree on that for neuroscientific data. In molecular biology, there is the central dogma and since it was proposed by Crick most of the molecular biological research haｓ been focused around it. In neuroscience, on the other hand, it is very difficult to come up with a similar dogma because cognition cannot be described as a linear process. As a result neuroinformatics tends to be very diverse and diffused without a clear focus and if it continues, little will come out from large collaborative research which needs a well-defined direction.

I am not really qualified to suggest what should be the central topic of neroinformatics, but at least I can suggest something simpler. If you search the word “neuroinformatics” by Google, you will find a lot of databases, software and other research activities related to it. Funnily enough though, there seem to be little connections between them despite the popular mantra that neuroinformatics is about connecting data and people with different backgrounds together. Perhaps it would be useful if we can have a unified portal site from which neuroscientists can find data they need as well as right research groups who share common or complementary interest. Maybe I should set up the site. Is there anyone who wants to collaborate with me?