ABOVE: © ISTOCKPHOTO.COM, imaginima
Nearly 30 years ago, Kamran Khodakhah, now a neuroscientist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, signed up for a TV repair course that met several times a week at night at a local community college in London. While many of the other students were attending with the obvious goal of repairing TVs and other appliances, Khodakhah had a different aim. He reasoned that if he could understand how a television worked, he could design new tools to study the rat brain slices he had collected.
Khodakhah was working as a PhD student in the lab of neuroscientist David Ogden at the National Institute for Medical Research, trying to determine whether a particular signaling pathway—the inositol trisphosphate (InsP3)/calcium signaling pathway—could be activated in nerve cells called Purkinje neurons. They are found in the cerebellum and have a high density of InsP3 receptors. By taking the TV repair ...
