Brain Vol. 127 No. 11 © Guarantors of Brain 2004; all rights reserved
Editorial |
Editorial
The few changes in content planned for Brain are now introduced, although the design and appearance of articles, including the abstracts, may alter slightly next year. Our extended book review in the present issue is by Ray Tallis. He tackles consciousness. In addition to his role as a gerontologist in Manchester (UK), Professor Tallis is well known to readers of the Times Literary Supplement as a penetrating and analytical reviewer of contemporary philosophy—robustly blowing the whistle on cant and clap-trap. In his full frontal assaults on the likes of (the late) Jacques Derrida, Ray is no shrinking violet or punch-puller. That style is evident in his review of three books on the nature and neural basis of consciousness. Professor Tallis laments the current state of neurophilosophy. Not afraid of Nobel laureates, Gerald Edelman and Francis Crick, or their disciples, he unpicks their analyses and, in the end, prefers thoughts on the subject by Adam Zeman (an Edinburgh-based neurologist and himself a reviewer for the London Times): ‘[Zeman] has no wares to sell: his viewpoint is one of fully informed uncertainty... an incomparably clear guide to theories put forward by others, including those of Gerald Edelman and of Christof Koch’. Readers of Brain can take a ringside seat as these heavyweights of neurophilosophy slug it out.By an unhappy coincidence, our receipt of Tallis's essay coincided with the death of Francis Crick (1916–2004). Discovering the double helical structure of DNA, base pair coding for amino acids, and the principles of gene transcription, arguably the defining statements of 20th century biology, do not make Crick the special property of neuroscience. But with waning interest in molecular biology from the 1970s, he spent the last 25 years of his extraordinarily active intellectual life working at the Salk Institute (La Jolla) trying to understand consciousness. The approach was theoretical not experimental. His stance was strictly anatomical. Where is consciousness located? Evidently, his last ideas focused on the claustrum because of its rich reciprocal connectivity with the cortex (see Nature August 19, 2004). For many years, his main collaborator in formulating the neural correlate of consciousness was Christof Koch, whose book we review (p. 2558).
Brain publishes those articles that we perceive to be the best and most interesting for our readers from amongst the many submitted. Fashions and interests may change, particularly with a new team, but the present issue continues to reflect the wise judgements of the former editors. We publish further papers on the preoperative evaluation and outcome of surgery for epilepsy (p. 2406 {Fauser}, see Scientific Commentary, and p. 2419 {Richardson}); articles that establish a neural basis for disorders—bipolar depression (p. 2433 {Bruno} and migraine, p. 2459 {Lang})—once formulated only in terms of altered brain function; and studies that lean on authoritative epidemiological samples for their analyses of life expectancy in epilepsy (p. 2427 {Gaitatzis}), morbidity and mortality in CADASIL (p. 2533 {Opherk}) and antecedent childhood infections in people with multiple sclerosis (p. 2491 {Bager}). The exquisite vulnerability of the nervous system to inflammation, and the precautions needed in interpreting surrogate imaging-based markers of the consequences in the context of optic neuritis (p. 2498 {Hickman})—building on their somewhat similar studies, already published), provides a back-drop for considering whether training might enhance the functional consequences of plasticity in the context of multiple sclerosis (p. 2506 {Morgen}). Repairing the damaged nervous system takes a further hesitant step forward with the demonstration that, after complex chimeric manipulations, bone marrow-derived stem cells integrate with target tissues and modestly alter the phenotype in a murine model of superoxide dismutase 1-associated motor neuron disease (ALS).
Clinical neuroscience largely came of age through the acquisition of knowledge derived from the traditional but now threatened discipline of clinico-pathological correlation. We publish studies on fronto-temporal dementia (p. 2441 {Paviour}) and head injury (p. 2470 {Maxwell}), but perhaps in no branch of clinical neuroscience has detailed clinical and pathological description enabled modern technologies to make their impact more than in neurogenetics. Whilst it is now a more or less routine business to roll out the genome machinery and mop up another Mendelian disorder, thereby (for example) bagging a new spino-cerebellar degeneration (SCA23: p. 2551; {Verbeek}), the status of these additions to neurological nosology requires dedicated clinical field work and meticulous pathological description. In 1984, Anita Harding published the landmark monograph The Hereditary Ataxias and Related Disorders based on her doctoral thesis. Anita bridged the classical era of family pedigree analysis and clinical observation with the new genetics. But, as she was quick to point out, that work leaned on classical descriptions made with bare neurological hands and entirely without the benefit of microsatellites or single nucleotide polymorphisms. SCA23 is an autosomal dominant cerebellar ataxia of late onset. Anita Harding describes these disorders in Chapter 10 of her book, highlighting the classical account of Gordon Holmes (Brain 1907; 30: 466–88 and 545–68). However, as Harding and Holmes acknowledged, the first description of this variant of spino-cerebellar degeneration was published by Sanger Brown in Brain (see next page) ...
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