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In a recent study, Professor Margaret Esiri of the Department of Clinical Neurology set out to try and find changes in a deep part of the human brain that might be associated with autism.

For this she needed brain samples after death from people who had autism, and also from people without. That way she could compare the two groups and look for any differences in the brains in terms of their organisation, changes in cells and their chemistry, or the biological molecules present.

Such differences could shed insight into the causes of autism. However, she was only able to use samples from five people with autism, and only four brains from those without. This wasn’t nearly enough to be able to say if there were any differences. Larger studies would be required to get reliable information.

In the UK, there are only 20 autism brains available for research. That really stops any research like this in its tracks.

‘We need hundreds of brains for research,’ says Professor Esiri. ‘And we also need normal brains for comparison. There is a severe shortage of normal brains for research, particularly from those who died at a young age.’

This situation prompted Professor Esiri and colleagues from other UK universities to appeal for more people to register their desire to donate their brains after death to help research into all kinds of conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease multiple sclerosis, and motor neurone disease.

They held a press briefing in London and the response to all the coverage has been very positive. ‘The science correspondents present at the briefing even came up to us afterwards and asked how they could register,’ says Professor Esiri. ‘Following an article in The Oxford Times, the Lord Mayor of Oxford has also kindly offered to donate her brain after her death.’

I don’t know if all that means you’d be in good company or not, but if you would be interested in donating your own brain for research after your death, Professor Margaret Esiri says you can email her in the first instance at [email protected]

How did things get so bad? Well, there’s no system in the UK for donating normal brains for research. The transplant register is for just that – transplants. And giving your body to medical education helps train would-be doctors, but is not for research.

While other organs can be sampled during life for biopsies and diagnostic tests, that obviously can’t be done for the brain. So there is no general method for obtaining brain samples, as well as a lack of awareness of the problem among doctors and nurses and the general public.

Efforts are being made to redress the problem. The Medical Research Council (MRC) is in the process of setting up a national brain bank network. And in Oxford, the Brain Bank for Autism & Related Developmental Research has recently been established thanks to the work of the charity Autism Speaks UK. This new initiative will form part of the Thomas Willis Oxford Brain Collection, an existing brain bank with samples largely for dementia research.

By providing a rich resource for research in this way, it may be possible to make real strides in understanding the basis for behavioural changes seen in people as dementia progresses and which is such a burden for families to cope with.

Or it might be possible to link up changes seen in brain scans of people with multiple sclerosis while they are alive with biochemical or neurological changes in brain samples after death. Tissue samples will also be important to understand the effect new drugs might have on the pathology of disease.

So medical science needs you. Or at least, it’d be very happy with your brain. 

In this week's Geophysical Research Letters Oxford's Scott Osprey and Giles Barr report how data collected from the MINOS experiment in a disused US iron-mine is shedding light on what's happening 20 miles up in the Earth's stratosphere.

The UK's NCAS and STFC highlighted this new work, I asked Scott and Giles about cosmic rays, climate science and mines...

Oxford Science Blog: Why do we need underground detectors to monitor what's happening in the stratosphere?
Scott Osprey: Paradoxically, the further underground detectors are placed, the better we find correlations between cosmic rays (muons) and stratospheric temperature. This counterintuitive result is a consequence of the very high energy cosmic rays being sensitive to changing conditions in the atmosphere.

Giles Barr: At a more technical level, the cosmic rays start off as protons which interact in the atmosphere to make pions, these then decay to make muons which we can detect. The chain is therefore protons -> pions -> muons. While the cosmic rays are pions, they can interact again which causes them to be lost (they split up in to many lower energy particles which we can't distinguish from background). This possibility of them interacting depends on the temperature.

It turns out, as Scott says, that the higher energy ones (which we can detect most easily by going underground) have the best sensitivity to the temperature, because they have come from pions which interact enough.

OSB: What are the challenges of doing research in a disused iron-mine?
GB: Our hosts at Fermilab and the University of Minnesota have built an underground lab which is spacious, brightly lit, dry and has a flat floor. We have fork-lift trucks, internet access, microwaves and desks down there. The mine professionals who run the operation are really good at their jobs.

When we made the detector, everything had to be designed to fit down the mineshaft, so the steel sheets which the detector was made of were hauled down in strips and then welded together underground. There is no-one there overnight, so the detector is made to stay running without humans around: We have made it so that virtually everything is controllable remotely over the internet, so we can get things going again without having to go down the mine. 

OSB: What is the significance of being able to link an increase in cosmic rays to Sudden Stratospheric Warming?
SO: It better highlights the physical link between cosmic ray muons and the atmosphere by identifying them with other known phenomena occurring in the atmosphere. This gives us confidence that we actually understand the underlying physics. For those interested in other aspects, it adds to our armoury of observations, and potentially gives us a new tool to use.

GB: There are many things which affect cosmic rays on their journey through the galaxy, into the solar system and then the atmosphere.  From the cosmic ray physics point of view, this allows us to check some aspects of this process. 

OSB: How much do we still not understand about the overall impact of cosmic rays on climate?
GB: There are some other groups who are studying the effect that cosmic rays might induce cloud formation, that as the cosmic ray whizzes through bits of the atmosphere its ionisation trail could start droplets off which could then form clouds, but we are not looking into that at all. Our research points out that there is an effect in the opposite 'cause>effect' direction, that the state of the atmosphere affects the number of cosmic rays we see.

SO: These results do not say anything about the possible effects of cosmic rays on climate. Actually, this turns the topic on its head: by highlighting the impact of a changing atmosphere on cosmic rays. However, the 'philosophy' may be relevant for those investigating the possible effects of cosmic-rays on climate: by promoting others to examine environmental effects in the cosmic rays of lower energy, thought relevant to these studies.

OSB: How might further research in this area benefit climate researchers?
GB: The basic physics behind these environmental effects has been known for a long time in the particle physics community. However, very few studying climate will know of these. In the early days of cosmic ray research, in the 1940's and 1950's, there was a need for both meteorologists and particle physicists to work closely together. Since then the communities have diverged somewhat, following the subsequent development of large and powerful 'atom-smashers'.

Recently, certain hot-topics have brought aspects of each others work to the other's attention. Some of this has been met with a mixed reception. However, future work, such as from the NCAS/MINOS collaboration, can only prove beneficial in the long run.

Dr Scott Osprey and Dr Giles Barr are based at Oxford's Department of Physics, Dr Osprey is lead scientist of this study for NCAS, Dr Barr is funded by STFC for his work with MINOS.

In his new book Graham Richards, who recently retired from Oxford where he was Head of Chemistry, tells the story of his involvement in technology transfer, launching the spin-out Oxford Molecular Ltd and his role in the founding of the University's technology transfer company, Oxford University Innovation.

I asked Graham about his 20+ years of experience helping to turn research into business:

OxSciBlog: What one thing could government do to boost the commercialisation of research?
Graham Richards: In the current financial climate raising funds to start - and even more for second round funding - is difficult. Of course everyone thinks that Government funding would solve their particular problem, but spin-out companies offer one of the few attractive ways of helping the country to recover.

We need new industries and new big companies. Spin-outs can provide these and we need lots of new billion pound companies. Relatively small amounts of Government cash would facilitate this and the alternatives of venture capital and the banks no longer exist. Thus a Government investment fund of, say, £100 million could be very effective and even profitable for the taxpayer: perhaps a couple of Googles.

OSB: What was your view of technology transfer before you launched your first spinout?
GR: I was totally ignorant and indeed Oxford Molecular was the first of the modern style spin-outs where the University had equity in return for its intellectual  property, which had then only very recently been given to the University. We very much made it up as we went along, including the division of the equity, which was split one third each to the University, the venture capitalist backers and the founders.

OSB: How have your views changed after two decades of involvement in spinouts?
GR: The University now has, in the shape of Isis Innovation, a very professional technology transfer organisation which can really support the researcher who wants to go down the spin-out route and is prepared to put in the effort. Things are much easier and there are plenty of role models to follow. It is also true that it is no longer so unusual to follow this path.

OSB: What advice would you give scientists considering commercialising their research?
GR: Go to talk to Isis at the earliest possible stage. They will help in almost every way but particularly in the early stage in protecting the intellectual property. Secondly, be prepared to put in some time: it is not trivial. Finally, in general, remain as an academic and get others to run the company. Perhaps the most vital step is finding the initial CEO. The latter will help both with the business plan and also in raising funding.

'Spin-Outs: Creating Businesses from University Intellectual Property' by Graham Richards is published by Harriman House.

 Highlights from OU science in the news this week:

Where does the Manx Shearwater go on its 20,000km migration?

A team of scientists including Oxford's Tim Guilford have been following the seabird on its travels using electronic tags.

As BBC Online's Mark Kinver reports, unusually for seabirds migrating over the open sea, Manx make 'pit-stops'. Tim said: 'Every one of the 12 birds made at least one stop during its migration in one place for up to two weeks.'

It's thought that they've adopted this strategy so as not to carry the extra fat they would need to make the trip in one go. Their travels take them over Africa, to South America and back to Britain via the Atlantic. The team hope to do similar work on puffins.

Galaxy helpers
Can the public make light work of big science?

The lesson from the Galaxy Zoo project, as Suw Charman-Anderson writes in The Guardian, is that it certainly can.

She talks to one of the founders of Galaxy Zoo, Dr Chris Lintott about how the galaxy-classifying site became a runaway success that turned into an exemplar of how 'crowdsourcing' and web tech can transform science. 

Chris and colleagues are now thinking about how these lessons could be applied to processing data from other science projects, such as images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Chris comments: 'It's like Nasa does the map and we'll write the guide book.'

Atishoo!
That's the sound of your cells activating each other according to research by Oxford's Anant Parekh.

Anant told BBC Online and BBC South Today Oxford about his work examining how cells interact to create the sort of extreme allergic response suffered by around 20 million people in the UK.

'They have shown that once a mast cell has been activated, it chemically activates other mast cells. These cells act together to create an allergic response,' the article explains. The hope is that further research will lead to medications that block this response.

Rare roar
News of the Caspian tiger's demise may have been somewhat exaggerated...

At least that's a conclusion you could draw from research led by Carlos Driscoll of Oxford's WildCRU into the tiger family tree. As ScienceNOW highlights, the mitochondrial DNA of the extinct Caspian and the living Siberian tiger differs by just one letter of genetic code.

This means that, in a sense, the Caspian tiger never became extinct, just that there never was any separate animal known as a 'Siberian' tiger. 

Sexy/smelly
An essay on pheromones in this week's Nature made Wired Science sniff a story, as they quizzed the author, Tristram Wyatt from the Department of Zoology, about the challenging search for human pheromones.

'We produce a large number of compounds, and bacteria ferment our secretions,' said Wyatt. 'You're trying to find a few active compounds from a forest of thousands of compounds.' Don't believe in love potions just yet as Tristram estimates it could still take decades to find these elusive molecules.

Moving maths 
If you ever wondered what attracts people to mathematics then read up about Oxford's Marcus du Sautoy in The Times and Mail on Sunday.

Telling the moving story of Jonathan, his stillborn son, Marcus writes: 'I became a mathematician because I like things to make sense. I like structure and logic... I have never been able to cope with the uncertainty and lack of control in the physical world. That is why I was drawn to the clean, unforgiving logic of the mathematician's lab.'

And finally...
Do methane plumes mean there's life on Mars?

A lot of headline writers seemed convinced by the latest data from NASA on the Red Planet but Oxford's Fred Taylor told Lewis Smith in The Times (and others) that it was useful evidence but no real proof.

Fred explained: 'If it's focused it’s much more likely to be coming from the interior of the planet, and therefore it's quite hard to think of a non-biological source. It could be that some kind of chemistry nobody understands is occurring. You can make methane inorganically in a chemistry lab quite easily... This paper doesn’t settle anything finally. What it says is ’come and have a look’. We need to go there.'

A summer holiday on Mars? Now there's a thought...

Today's Nature features an essay by Oxford's Tristram Wyatt on pheromones, I quizzed him about these intriguing chemicals:

OxSciBlog: What purpose do pheromones serve?
Tristram Wyatt: Animals use pheromones in all sorts of ways and pheromones are probably the commonest form of communication across all species of the animal kingdom (even though we cannot hear or see the messages).

Sex pheromones are used by many species and it was the silk moth sex pheromone that was the first one identified, 50 years ago this year. Dogs use a powerful sex pheromone as every dog owner will know – though this is one pheromone that we've not yet identified.

Social insects run their whole societies with pheromones, from trails and nest building to alarm pheromones to bring rapid defence of the colony. Social insects also provide good examples of primer pheromones, which have longer term effects on physiology. The queen honey bee sends a pheromone message round the hive which stops the workers laying their own eggs.

Underwater animals use pheromones too – for example goldfish have sex pheromone duets and lobsters do too. Humans undoubtedly have pheromones but none have been chemically identified.

OSB: Do animals send false pheromone signals?
TW: Yes, one of the most spectacular is the bolas spider which synthesizes moth pheromones which are so good that they attract male moths (to their death). Some orchids do a similar thing with the pheromones of wasps and bees to lure them to visit the flower to take on pollen – and deliver it to the next flower when they are duped again by the fake pheromones.

OSB: Why do you think theories about human pheromones are so controversial?
TW: I think we find it disturbing to imagine our behaviour could be influenced by chemicals given off by another human being! Yet at the same time most perfumes are advertised with the promise of just this kind of effect.

There may be a reluctance still to accept that we are mammals – and as mammals it is highly likely that we use pheromones, though there's no evidence for ones with instant effects like the dog or moth sex pheromone.

OSB: What are the biggest questions about human pheromones that remain to be answered?
TW: Well the first challenge is to chemically identify the first one. We are at the stage where we have some phenomena, for example hormonal effects on women when they smell sweat extracts from male armpits, which are pheromonal but the chemicals involved have not been identified.

We're at an early stage of understanding. It has been likened to the way that for hundreds of years doctors used foxglove leaf extracts to help with heart disease but it was relatively recently that the active molecule, digitalis (digoxin), in the leaf extracts was isolated, identified and synthesized.

Another candidate is the pheromone produced by women that appears to mediate the effect of menstrual syncrony in women living in close proximity. Again this has been shown to be produced by the armpits. I know that at least one team is trying to track down the chemical identity of the molecule. If they can find it, a whole new range of drug targets for contraceptive agents may open up.

Dr Tristram Wyatt is based at Oxford's Department of Zoology