Has Neuroscience Society Growth Been Too Fast For Its Own Good?

Forty-five years ago David Hubel thought he would become a physicist. That is, until he went to his first international scientific meeting. “I was scared off by the number of people,” recalls Hubel so he switched to a science still in its infancy and far more intimate—a science called neurophysiology, The move proved to be very useful for science—in 1981 Hubel received the Nobel Prize in medicine for his contributions to understanding the organization and functioning of the brain. But today Hubel a professor at Harvard, must worry that his field is going through the same explosive growth that drove him away from physics. As president of the 14,000-member Society for Neuroscience, which is holding its 19th annual meeting this week in Phoenix, Hubel is grappling with the possibility that this growth will discourage the next generation of world-class scientists anO unoermine me society s very reason for being. “I think everyone, young and old, is appalled about the size [of the society],” he says. Appalled, yes, but many members still wouldn’t want to be anywhere during the week-long meeting. “It’s just a great celebration of the diversity of the field,” says Carla Shatz, a professor of neurobiology at Stanford. “It’s wonderful to be reminded that it’s just enormous.” Begun in 1969 in the basement of one of its 21 founders, the Society for Neuroscience was created to provide a forum for investigators to share ideas about the nervous system (see accompanying story). The idea worked, perhaps too well. In a matter of months, 500 scientists had joined the new society. In 10 years its membership rolls had grown to 5,000; by 1985 they had reached 10,000. Some of these members were new to the world of research. Many were physiologists, anatomists, or psychologists who identified the nervous system as a professional rallying point and who shifted their allegiance to this society. “The meeting has made a tremendous difference,” says Lorne Mendell, professor of neurobiology and behavior at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. “I think the society has been partly responsible for the burgeoning interest. It caused recognition of the fact that neuroscience is really a discipline.” But the days when the annual meeting provided plenty ot opportunities for informal conversations and fostered a sense of brotherhood with everyone in the field are history. This year’s meeting offers a dozen concurrent talks at any onetime, running simultaneously with about 40 poster sessions, plus 17 symposia, all of which will be attended by about 13,000 people. Recent schisms in other organizations, notably the split between scientists and practitioners within the 97-year-old American Psychological Association and the splintering of the International Conference on AIDS- after only five meetings, hint at what can happen when organizations get too big. Members long for less formidable conferences and more opportunities for casual interaction. Unfortunately for the original organization, the offspring sometimes take with them much of the energy and creativity that fueled the parent society’s growth in the first place. Neuroscientists do not want to see that happen to their field. They say that cross-fertilization is too important, and that a division into subspecialties would prevent such a mingling of ideas. But neuroscientists reluctantly admit that the size of the meeting is already taking its toll. “It’s nice to get people together, but they go to their own sessions,” says Richard Scheller, an associate professor of biological sciences at Stanford. “I’m not sure there’s that much mixing of the disciplines. It just doesn’t work that way.” That’s also the way it looks to Bernice Grafstein, professor of physiology and Astor Professor of Neuroscience at Cornell Medical College and a former president of the society. “Just being able to handle that amount of information is a real problem,” she says. “You tend to focus on your own specialty; there’s less incidental exposure.” Almost everyone fondly recalls friendlier, less frenetic times. In 197 1, at its first meeting, 1,395 participants reviewed 269 abstracts (there were no symposia) in three days. Now, because they must have 12,000 hotel rooms, 200 individual meeting rooms, an auditorium that seats 5,000 and space for posters, society officials must choose from a list of fewer than a dozen cities that can meet their requirements. That often means a big, crowded city, where inexpensive accommodations are hard to find. The increased expense also makes it more difficult for students to attend. ‘The national meeting has reached a point where something has to be done,” says Edward A. Kravitz, George Packer Berry professor of neurobiology at Harvard. “Somehow it has to be scaled down, even though you want to keep it all together.” Through the years, the society has squeezed in more papers and more participants while working hard to make the meeting seem smaller than it really is. In 1975, the society became one of the first to encourage and expand poster sessions. Special-interest dinners and socials bring together colleagues who thought otherwise miss each other in the crowds. Satellite meetings let participants deal with special topics. To simplify the problem of finding time for everything, the society provides participants with customized schedules. A few years ago members, when they preregistered, were given the chance to submit key words and receive a list of talks with those words in their titles. This year, taking that procedure one step further, the society provided the program on disk, so that researchers could manipulate their schedule individually. There’s talk of trying to color-code related talks in the schedule or putting related topics in adjacent rooms, again to help scientists trying to get as much as they can out of the five-day event. But these efforts to make the meeting more accessible to attendees receive mixed reviews. Some students tout the value of posters, because they let attendees talk to investigators and reread sections they do not understand. But Harvard graduate student Doreen Valentine says she’s overwhelmed by row after row of charts, texts, and investigators. One scientist says he feels like he’s muscling his way through a Macy’s clearance sale rather than taking a leisurely stroll through the latest scientific advances. This week society members are being asked to rule on a proposal to limit the number of abstracts that can be presented. Under the present rules, the meeting accepts any member-sponsored abstract as long as it meets animal welfare standards. “Early on it was decided that the society should not decide what is neuroscience, so nothing is excluded,” says Story C. Landis, professor and director of the Center for Neurosciences at Case Western Reserve University. The proposals include suggestions that members not be allowed to sponsor abstracts by nonmembers, that committees select abstracts to be accepted, or that a lottery be used to eliminate a percentage of the papers. But some veteran members warn against moving too fast. “It would be a serious mistake to downsize the meeting in an artificial way,” says Stony Brook’s Mendell. “I think that [downsizing] would break it up faster than anything else.” One alternative involves “megaposters,” in which everyone in a lab would present the work collectively. “Right now it’s a more fractured picture,” says Wendy Weiger, an M.D.-Ph.D. neuroscience student at Harvard, about the tendency for members of the same lab to present their talks and posters in different sessions. The megaposters would also serve to restore the interdisciplinary character of the meeting, as a single team might consist of geneticists, immunocytochemists, neurophysiologists, and behavioral scientists. Whatever the outcome, the debate touches on the very premise on which neuroscience was founded. Created to foster diversity, the society has clung stubbornly to its heter ogeneity. “We set it up so essentially anybody can join,” says Vernon Mountcastle, university professor of neurophysiology at Johns Hopkins. “That really opens it up; there isn’t any inner clique.” The nominating committee even tries to rotate the presidency so that its nominees represent different specialties. But the problem won’t go away by itself. If the meetings are not scaled down, goes one line of thinking, perhaps the society should break up the annual meeting. But there is no agreement on the fission lines. “We sit around discussing this,” says Hubel, “but I don’t know what can be done.” Hubel rejects the suggestion that cellular and molecular neurobiologists go off on their own by noting that “the central nervous system supplies some of the problems for the cellular and molecular people to work on.” Another idea is to divide into a sensory group, for those who study inputs into the nervous system, and a motor group, for those who study outputs. But neither group really wants to abandon the other. And there are a bevy of specialized conferences, including the Gordon Conferences each summer, to meet the need for close interaction. For the time being, then, nobody is predicting the end of the organization. “There may be a cetrifugal tendency as we get bigger and bigger,” says Katherine Bick, a neuroscientist and National Institutes of Health deputy director for extramural research, “but as long as young people see it as a place they can strut their stuff, it will still be important.” As Hopkins’ Mountcastle observes, “There is still that basic unifying thread—interest in the brain—that is unique.”

Has Neuroscience Society Growth Been Too Fast For Its Own Good?

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