To chart this alien terrain, Bower has deployed his troops in an astonishing variety of strategies. "The central focus of the laboratory's experimental approach," says Bower, "is the interaction between computer models and experimental investigations." Based on known anatomical and physiological structures, some of his crew use sophisticated computer modeling techniques to map neurons and decipher how neural circuitry works. To assist in this quest, they've devised a general purpose neural network simulation software program, GENESIS, now being used at hundreds of institutions around the world, to support the construction of structural simulations of real neural networks.
Other colleagues experiment on animals to map anatomical structures in the cerebellar cortex, involved in sensory and fine motor control, and the piriform cortex, thought to be the seat of our sense of smell. Still others are studying the behavior of weakly electric fish, whose internal sensor system seems to be a primitive cerebellum-like structure. Others are painstakingly constructing exquisitely sensitive high tech probes to penetrate deep inside living tissue and collect needed data without disturbing the host.
Bower's lab doesn't look like a typical biology laboratory -- so-called wet labs -- where teams of scientists cluster around long Formica-topped tables, peer through microscopes at living cells, and record data. It's more of a dry lab, a series of rooms filled with graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and assorted staffers clicking away at computer keyboards. The laboratory is also electronically tethered to supercomputer centers in San Diego and Pittsburgh, and to research centers around the world, in Antwerp, Paris, Israel, Oslo, and Bozeman, Montana, where a $26 million building that will house the Bozeman Center for Computational Biology is now under construction at Montana State University. (In his "spare" time, Bower is also deeply involved in reforming science education and helped develop an innovative science education program in the Pasadena schools now being copied across the country).
"The way I work reflects the Internet and the capacity the Internet gives us to link people in remote sites in different ways to take advantage of resources," Bower explains. "In the old days, if you wanted to use some new techniques, you'd write a grant to federal agencies and build equipment in your lab. Now we link up with people who already have that equipment in other places and set up the interchange over the Net. I have graduate students all over the world and I have collaborations all over the world."
--Linda Marsa
