Why practical summer courses in neuroscience matter

On a muggy July evening in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, as vacationers lounged on nearby beaches, a group of scientists clustered around a solitary fruit fly suspended in a virtual reality flight simulator. The scientists flicked a switch to bathe the tethered fly in spooky red light. Almost immediately, the fly’s wingbeat frequency began to plummet. The fruit fly had been genetically engineered to express a light-gated ion channel in the motor neurons controlling its respiratory system, enabling the scientists to optogenetically cut off the oxygen supply to the insect’s muscles and brain.

Playing through a speaker hooked up to an optical wingbeat analyzer, the peppy whine of the fly’s wings deepened to a weary drone … 200 hertz … 180 … 160. Suddenly, the din cut to silence as the fly ceased to beat its wings. At that moment, the seed of a scientific factoid was born: A fruit fly can sustain flight while holding its breath for less than three seconds. The scientists hooted with the thrill of discovery and immediately prepared another fly to repeat the experiment.

I witnessed this particular experiment as an instructor in the Neural Systems & Behavior (NS&B) summer course at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), a center for biological research and education in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. MBL has been hosting courses for more than century, a vibrant tradition that has spread to other institutions. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory offers courses on a range of neuroscience techniques; the Allen Institute and the University of Washington jointly host the Dynamic Brain workshop at Friday Harbor Laboratories; and the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics hosts rotating neuroscience courses at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Neuroscience summer courses outside the United States include the Cajal courses in Europe; the Riken CBS Summer Program in Japan; CAMP@Bangalore in India; and the Small Brains, Big Ideas course in Chile.

Access to hands-on training courses has also recently expanded to traditionally neglected regions of the global South because of the efforts of organizations such as Teaching and Research in Natural Sciences for Development in Africa and the International Brain Research Organization. During the COVID-19 pandemic, access to intensive summer courses was expanded even further through the creation of an online computational summer course, Neuromatch Academy.

These kinds of courses provide a structured environment for students and instructors to focus on the most basic and joyful aspects of being a scientist. The courses offer graduate students and postdoctoral researchers exposure to a breadth of scientific ideas, teach new technical skills and forge new relationships in the fire of collaborative scientific endeavor. For faculty like me, these courses deliver sublime moments of discovery that reconnect us to why we became scientists in the first place. Like a washed-up sports hero rediscovering his love of the game by coaching a team of underdogs to victory, I always return home from the course physically exhausted but intellectually invigorated and reinspired.

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any of the original summer research courses started at MBL and other marine labs, which provide an ideal location to collect and study experimentally convenient marine invertebrates. The squid giant axon, a now-canonical system in neuroscience, was discovered by MBL scientists in the early 20^th century and subsequently used to figure out how the flow of ions across a cell membrane produces electrical spikes in neurons. The course I co-teach, NS&B, has been running for almost 50 years, having evolved from MBL’s original zoology course, which was established in 1888. I first participated in NS&B as a graduate student in 2011, when my Ph.D. adviser brought me along as a teaching assistant.

Like generations of scientists before me, I find myself drawn back to MBL year after year. Why is it so appealing to spend two weeks of my summer cloistered in the lab, when I could be, say, vaping weed and listening to the “Huberman Lab” podcast under a beach umbrella? The reason is simple: It’s fun. In my opinion, fun is an underappreciated ingredient for scientific innovation. Like Victor Frankenstein, many of us were drawn into neuroscience out of a fascination with the secrets of life and the mind. It can also be deeply satisfying to pursue this curiosity through tinkering and experimentation.

The structure of the NS&B course is based on Krogh’s principle, articulated in 1929 by the illustrious physiologist August Krogh: “For many problems, there is an animal on which it can be most conveniently studied.” Following this ethos, the course is divided into modules taught by different faculty who focus on different model organisms and fundamental scientific questions. Mornings are dedicated to faculty lectures, and afternoons and evenings are spent in the lab, with occasional breaks for external lectures, professional development sessions or visits to nearby Stony Beach for a swim. Students often learn new techniques, but the overall goal is to show them how basic principles emerge from studying diverse species, with each animal providing unique experimental advantages and conceptual insights.

The somatosensory module, for example, led by Ann Clemens and Michael Brecht, starts with a series of brainstorming sessions in which the instructors ask the students to come up with the most “out there” and original ideas they can think of within the realm of rodent somatosensation. Clemens says they normally converge on something one or two steps up from the craziest idea. This past summer, one of the students asked about the sensory experience of rat pups when they are picked up by their mother. The students discovered that grasping a specific part of the pup’s neck evokes immobility and folding of the feet, and that pups adjust their posture to make it easier for their mother to transport them. Within just a couple of months, that “crazy idea” evolved into a preprint that has now been published in Current Biology. Many projects require more time and effort to reach completion, so NS&B has a fund to support post-course travel. The two students who conducted the experiments testing the respiratory capacity of a fruit fly, for example, visited my lab in Seattle this past November to follow up on their initial results.

Neuroscience summer courses may seem costly, but they provide an incredible bang for the buck. NS&B, for instance, is primarily funded by an R25 grant from the National Institutes of Health and a grant from the Grass Foundation. Vendors lend software and hardware, including microscopes and cameras, and instructors use this as an opportunity to evaluate equipment before purchasing it. Faculty and teaching assistants receive room and board and a small stipend (less than I was paid for writing this article). The host lab of each student is asked to pay roughly $12,000 for tuition, room and board, but admissions is need-blind, and financial aid is available, enabling course organizers to recruit students from varied backgrounds. As a result, NS&B is among the most diverse scientific environments I have experienced. This diversity is a key ingredient driving creativity and innovation within the lab and is one of the reasons faculty like me return to MBL, stoked to work alongside and learn from the students each summer.

Since being suspended during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, NS&B and other summer neuroscience courses have come roaring back. These past two years at NS&B have felt especially delightful to me. I think this is because many of us have a revitalized appreciation for the importance of social interaction in making science a meaningful vocation. Although the myth prevails in the popular consciousness that scientific discoveries are commonly made by solitary geniuses (and we award prizes accordingly), in practice this is rarely the case. I suspect that Victor Frankenstein’s trajectory would have turned out differently if he had attended NS&B and learned how to have fun in the lab.