Had lunch with and attended a talk by Thomas Jessell today. My fellow neuroscience enthusiasts may know him as one of the authors, along with Eric Kandel and James Schwartz, of the bible of our field, “Principles of Neural Science”. He was quite an eloquent speaker and his research is pretty interesting. He’s currently at Columbia Med, using simple monosynaptic motor circuits as a model to study axon guidance and specificity. Unfortunately, the lecture hall was so full that I had to stand in the AV booth of the med school amphitheater through the entire lecture!