Engineering the Brain into a Solar-Powered Calculator and Will Biology Ever Be a "Real" Science?

• Engineering the brain is just cool, and this has to be the ultimate example. Groups from Stanford and The Max-Planck have collaborated to create transgenic mice whose neurons can be exquisitely controlled with photons of light. Neurons were engineered to express two types of photoreceptors from algae, one responsive to blue light which creates an action potential, and another responsive to red light which inhibits activity. This highly-specific tool (we're talking lasers) for probing neuronal circuitry will likely replace the far cruder electrode stimulator and undoubtedly open the way to vast new territories of research in neurobiology. Read the original Nature paper here, as well as another concurrently-published PLoS One paper describing a similar system in cultured neurons.

• As a biologist I'm always jealous of physicists, what with the Feynmanian mathematical certainty and Einsteinian grandeur that they wield in their quest to explain the universe. We biologists are are less self-confident bunch, tempered (and tortured) by lives predominated by experimental failures within the lab. Will biology ever join chemistry and physics as a so-called "capital-S Science", with a set of its own all-powerful, generalized and quantitative Laws? (Not to be confused with The Ten Commandments...) MIT biological historian Evelyn Fox Keller argues that biology may never see its Moses descend from the mountain. Instead, she suggests in this Nature essay, that biology is special, and the exceptions more important than the rule. Enquist and Stark, in this response, are more optimistic about the prospects for a quantitative Biology with all-encompassing Laws. Maybe there's hope for biology after all, and there will come a day when we can make predictions that even a VC investor would take to the bank.