...Message from the President, continued

 When SfN was founded in 1969, neuroscience was barely an independent discipline. It has now expanded to include 300 research areas. Many younger members would not recognize the neuroscience presented at SfN’s first annual meeting in 1971. Now-commonplace technologies like MRI and in situ hybridization were in their infancy, and it would be years before terms like patch clamp, CREB, and PTSD entered our collective vocabulary. Today, annual meetings feature rows of posters detailing neural network computer models, but networked personal computers controlled by keyboards (and a thing called a mouse) were first demonstrated in 1968, just prior to SfN’s incorporation.

This year, SfN will continue to recognize important events that make up our past by making a range of materials honoring the History of Neuroscience are available to members and the public. This includes a 6-volume print autobiography series of the lives and discoveries of preeminent neuroscientists as well as new autobiography videos of leading neuroscientists. From these materials, available on SfN’s Web site, users can learn about the history of the Society.

LOOKING FORWARD: 2009 AND BEYOND
At 40, the face of SfN has changed, and we are evolving to address new needs. A recent member survey has helped chronicle who we now are. Our membership is both younger — more than a third of our members are students or postdocs — and more international than ever.

As more than 36 percent of members reside outside the U.S., international members should have a stronger voice in SfN’s future. Thus, SfN Council recently announced that it is expanding eligibility for our international members to serve as a Councilor (Council is the governing body of SfN). This position will now be open to all regular members, wherever in the world they live and work, encouraging more representative voices to guide strategic decisions and plans for the Society’s future.

In addition, SfN has strengthened its partnerships with the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS — see interview, p. 10) and the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO, see NQ Summer 2008). SfN is also making the worldwide exchange of ideas a priority, offering reduced dues for scientists in developing countries and increasing the number of annual meeting travel awards we fund for young scientists from the around the world and travel awards to FENS and IBRO meetings.

To serve our younger members, SfN is expanding professional development. The Society recognizes and seeks to support the diverse career opportunities for today’s neuroscientists — in academia, industry, law, publishing, and journalism, among others. SfN plans to continue the great work started by NeuroJobs, the Committees on Women in Neuroscience and Diversity in Neuroscience, and partners like the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience and Association of Neuroscience Departments and Programs. Additionally, SfN recently created a new post-doc regular member dues category (see NQ summer 2008), being mindful of the external funding pressures and job-seeking challenges facing neuroscientists, particularly our younger colleagues. In the 2007 survey, members urged SfN to redouble its efforts to educate the public about neuroscience and I look forward to personally focusing on this effort during my presidency. This past year SfN launched the Neuroscience Education Resources Virtual Encycloportal (NERVE), which catalogs online resources for K-12 neuroscience education, and the Neuroscience Core Concepts, a guide to basic neuroscience principles correlated to U.S. National Science Education standards. This coming year will bring expanded Brain Awareness Week efforts and a special initiative that SfN will be sponsoring during my presidential year: a Neuroscience Research in Education Summit. The summit will bring together leading educators and scientists next summer to ensure we are integrating neuroscience knowledge about how students learn into the ways K-12 teachers teach.

ANNUAL MEETING 2009: HONORING EVOLUTION — AND HARNESSING IT FOR THE FUTURE
In SfN’s recent history, the Dialogues between Neuroscience and Society series has been a singular innovation of the annual meeting. From the Dalai Lama’s 2005 lecture to the 2008 Mark Morris event (now available online at www.sfn.org/am2008_videos), the Dialogues presentation offers an opportunity to relate neuroscience and broader issues in society. Neuroscience 2009 will be in Chicago, which offers attendees both a great city and a spectacular convention center. This year’s Dialogue will focus on the theme “Magic in the Brain.” For this event we are excited to host two renowned magicians: The Amazing Randi (www.randi.org/site/index.php/about-james-randi.html) and Apollo Robbins (www.istealstuff.com). My thinking behind choosing this theme is that, for centuries, magicians have been practicing their craft based on the way we perceive and encode information about the world. Thus their tricks and illusions have a lot to teach neuroscientists about perception, awareness, and attention. And besides, magic is simply fun, no matter how you look at it.

As we celebrate our 40th anniversary this year, the annual meeting will also recognize several additional important anniversaries for neuroscientists. 2009 marks Darwin’s 200th birthday, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. We will fittingly have the opportunity to celebrate these events together with a visit to the Field Museum in Chicago, which houses some of the world’s best biological and archeological exhibits and supports ongoing research in those fields and others. In addition, another anniversary occurs in 2009: the 60th anniversary of Hebb’s landmark book Organization of Behavior. So this year promises to be quite eventful for our field.

Reflecting on Darwin’s remarkable contributions for a moment, as we mark historic events in evolution in Chicago, it strikes me that the field of neuroscience and the Society have evolved over the years in ways that mirror the plasticity of the brain itself, which we now know retains the capacity to grow and change over a lifetime. That’s why my presidential lecture theme will be “A Changing Brain in a Changing World.” So the brain, the field that studies it, and the Society that supports it are successful for similar reasons: they learn and change, adapt and evolve.

SfN: CONTINUOUSLY STUDYING THE PRESENT TO SHAPE OUR FUTURE
At SfN’s inception in 1969, its articles of incorporation were remarkably forward-looking. Despite the changing face of SfN, there has never been a need to change the SfN charter. SfN’s founders envisioned the centrality of an all-encompassing annual meeting, intuited changes that were to come in our science, encouraged broad diffusion of neuroscience information, and stressed the importance of neuroscientists communicating with each other and the public.

As we look back from where we came, and then forward to where we are headed, it is great fun to try to imagine what the field will look like in 40 more years (or even 10 for that matter). While an intriguing exercise, the fact is that it is impossible to tell — neuroscience is simply moving too fast. Who knows what singular developments or discoveries might dramatically alter our field, both technically and conceptually? Who could have envisioned the impact of an experimental brain operation in 1953 when a 27-year-old man, Henry Molaison (known for the next 55 years as patient H.M.), had most of his medial temporal lobe surgically removed bilaterally to treat the devastating effects of epilepsy that he had endured since the age of nine. Last month, December 2008, marked the passing of H.M., a legend in the field of the neurobiology of learning and memory. The amnesia that H.M. exhibited after his surgery has been widely interpreted to mean there are at least two memory systems in the brain (one for declarative knowledge and another for implicit memory), and prompted a theoretical sea change in the field. Who knows where the next sea change will come from? Whatever its source, it will certainly be critically influenced by the ebb and flow of ideas fostered by SfN over the next 40 years.