The Tireless Brain Bot of the Finkbeiner Lab

The Brain Bot was born out of Steve Finkbeiner’s frustration. In the 1990s, as a postdoctoral fellow trying to understand why brain cells die in Huntington’s Disease, Finkbeiner spent hour after hour, day after day, in front of a microscope counting, describing, and cataloging cells in a dish.At the time, researchers had known for a decade that Huntington’s — just like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other so-called neurodegenerative diseases — is marked by characteristic protein clumps in the brain. But nobody could agree on what these clumps (known as plaques, tangles, and inclusions) were doing. Were they agents of destruction, triggering the cells (and, ultimately, the person) to die? Or were they incidental, accumulating in response to the disease but having no impact on its progression? Or were they actually a good thing, something the cell made to cope with getting sick?Read more at...Only Human, January 2014.Photo by Dr. Julia Kaye/Gladstone Institutes