Headlines from the Division of Biology

May 8, 2008 - In the biblical story in which two women bring a baby to King Solomon, both claiming to be the mother, he suggests dividing the child so that each woman can have half. Solomon's proposed solution, meant to reveal the real mother, also illustrates an issue central to economics and moral philosophy: how to distribute goods fairly. Now, researchers at the California Institute of Technology have discovered that reason struggles with emotion to find equitable solutions, and have pinpointed the region of the brain where this takes place. The concept of fairness, they found, is processed in the insular cortex, or insula, which is also the seat of emotional reactions. "The fact that the brain has such a robust response to unfairness suggests that sensing unfairness is a basic evolved capacity," notes Steven Quartz, an associate professor of philosophy at Caltech and author of the study.

May 5, 2008 - Scientists at Caltech have produced the first complete description of the complex network of genes that create a particular type of cell in an organism. Using the complete sequence of the California purple sea urchin and other techniques to determine the regulatory genes expressed at each point during embryonic development and how their interrelationships influence the architecture of the sea urchin's skeletal system, Eric Davidson and his colleagues created a complete blueprint for the development of a lineage of cells whose particular function is to build a series of biomineral skeletal rods inside the embryo. The work appears in the April 22 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

April 16, 2008 - Your brain gets a better workout when you change your routine, say scientists at the California Institute of Technology who have pinpointed one particular circuit that activates your ability to execute a decision. This finding may help drive research in neural prosthetics and in how unhealthy decisions are made. "How you decide to do things is fascinating, and not well understood," says Richard Andersen, Caltech's Boswell Professor of Neuroscience and senior researcher in the study. "We're looking at how different areas interact during the process&mdash'how you make a decision to plan a movement."

April 14, 2008 - In the brain, as in sports, sex, and life, timing—and teamwork—are everything. Such is the message of a series of studies by Caltech's Thanos Siapas and his postdoctoral researcher Evgueniy Lubenov that offer insight into the processes by which memories are stored in the brain and that may someday guide the development of new therapies to prevent epileptic seizures. Using computer models of neuronal circuits and experiments on live rats, the scientists are revealing the curious mechanism by which the brain spontaneously tips itself toward a state balanced between order and chaos. The driving factor in the brain's self-regulation, they say, is the timing of neural pulses.

October 2, 2007 - A team of Caltech researchers found an unexpected link connecting schizophrenia and autism to the importance of covering your mouth whenever you sneeze. Recent studies suggest that if a woman suffers even one respiratory infection during her second trimester, her offspring's risk of schizophrenia rises by three to seven times. Schizophrenia and autism have a strong (though elusive) genetic component. Susceptibility to these disorders is increased by something that occurs to mother or fetus during a bout with the flu. The researchers isolated a protein that plays a pivotal role in that dire chain of events. A paper containing their results, "Maternal immune activation alters fetal brain development through interleukin-6," is published in the October 3 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.