Lab work was busy today, though I still managed to attend some of the talks at a Symposium on Memory and Dementia sponsored by the HCNR. Though the list of speakers was impressive (Eric Kandel, Tom Sudhof, Carla Shatz), the talks were pretty bland overall. A labmate came back and said, “once again, I discover that science is not interesting.” The dean of the med school, however, gave a brief but interesting closing remark. According to him, a neurologist no less, Michaelangelo’s famous painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel depicted god as a sagittal section of the human brain! If you look carefully, you may even see a spinal cord and pituitary gland near the stalk. That’s amazing considering that it preceded Vesalius’ anatomical drawings by more than 20 years. There are some evidence that Michaelangelo indeed dissected human cadavers to study the human form for his artwork. Perhaps what scholars over the past five centuries have interpreted to be God bestowing intellect on man was actually a depiction of the brain imparting this gift upon humankind.