ANDRZEJ KRAUSE
Since it began publication almost 25 years ago, The Scientist’s mission has been to showcase the newest and best of what’s going on in the life sciences. It’s the breadth and pace of innovation that makes it so exciting to populate our pages with new fields of inquiry, bold experiments, and creative lab tools.
In this month’s issue we celebrate the new.
Barely a decade old, optogenetics—the use of genes that code for light-responsive membrane proteins to target selected neurons for study—was chosen by Nature as the 2010 Method of the Year. In “The Birth of Optogenetics” , MIT’s Ed Boyden offers an exciting first-person account of the invention and its development into a technique that can activate or silence the electrical activity of specific ...
