This image of ganglion cells, Müller cells and starburst amacrine cells in the human retina is from a patient suffering from retinitis pigmentosa (RP).  This disease this patient suffered from slowly causes people affected with this disease to go blind and is a constant reminder to me of why we engage in our research.

For some, this is a pretty, though abstract image created through a set of technologies called computational molecular phenotyping (CMP).   The colors in this image come from antibodies labeling taurine, glutamine and glutamate, all small molecular species that reveal metabolic states in these tissues.

For us, these images reveal variation in cell types as well as abnormalities in other kinds of cells that presage retinal stress and the cellular responses that alter the retina in ways that both cause blindness and make it difficult to rescue vision loss.  We also see the beginnings of changes in the circuitry of the retina that forever will alter the way that diseased retinas process information.

It turns out that retinas are powerfully complex and highly parallel processing devices with precise circuit topologies that process visual information so we can see.  Our work in understanding how retinas are wired, part of a new field called connectomics is only part of the problem as we start to unravel how retinas are constructed and how they alter their wiring in disease.  Understanding how retinas are wired is a fundamentally important area of science.  These retinas have evolved over 200-500 million years to be refined and energy efficient signal processing devices unmatched by silicon semiconductors.  While the basic science aspects of this work are compelling and the human application to disease in neuroscience and biomedicine are intrinsically motivating, for those that are more economically motivated, there are a number of direct and immediate economic benefits from work like this on biologically informed computing.

I am putting together a number of images like this for a grant I am writing to understand how this disease process alters circuitry of the retina.  Wish me luck as the current funding climate, especially after the sequestration of 2013 is making science in this country a much more difficult environment to continue discovery and its impact on biomedical research is going to be brutal.

Thank you Mom.  Love you.

This abstract was presented today at the Association for Research in Vision and Opthalmology (ARVO) meetings in Seattle, Washington by Corinne N. Beier, myself, Philip Huie, Yannis M. Paulus, Daniel Lavinsky, Loh-Shan B. Leung, Hiroyuki Nomoto,  Robert E. Marc, Daniel V. Palanker, and Alexander Sher.

Purpose: In the rabbit retina there is evidence of constructive retinal plasticity in response to focal ablation of a small patch of the photoreceptor layer by laser photocoagulation. After a two-month healing period, healthy photoreceptors migrate inwards filling the damaged area and restoring visual sensitivity to the lesion site. We investigated the integrity and function of the neural populations above the lesion, whether the migrating photoreceptors formed new connections with deafferented bipolar cells, and to what degree the new function resembled normal retinal function.

Methods: Retinal photocoagulation lesions of Moderate and Barely Visible clinical grades were produced in rabbits with a 532-nm laser, using beam diameter of 200 and 400 μm. Retinal ganglion cell (RGC) responses to spatio-temporal white noise stimulus were recorded on a 512-electrode array. Inner retinal neuron cell types were identified using Computational Molecular Phenotyping (CMP). Light evoked activity of the inner retinal neurons was measured through 1-amino-4-guanidobutane (AGB) labeling. Synaptic structure between photoreceptors and bipolar cells was characterized through transmission electron microscopy (TEM) imaging.

Results: The lesioned areas of the retina, after a two-month healing period, regained visual sensitivity. There was no significant difference between the response kinetics of RGCs with receptive fields covering the lesioned area and RGCs with receptive fields unaffected by the lesion. Furthermore, the average receptive field sizes of RGCs covering the lesion were consistent with the average receptive field sizes of RGCs unaffected by the lesion. CMP showed that all major inner retinal neuron cell types are present above both acute and healed lesions. Light evoked activity in the retina, as measured by AGB concentration levels, was diminished in the acute lesion but returned to within 10% of normal after two months. TEM images showed normal photoreceptor synaptic structure inside the healed lesion area.

Conclusions: Migrating photoreceptors establish new functional connectivity to deafferented bipolar cells and have normal synaptic structure. The new circuitry results in spatial and temporal properties of the RGC responses that resemble those of the healthy retina. In summary, the rewiring restores normal visual response in the lesioned area, indicating constructive retinal plasticity.

Support: Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface; the Pew Charitable Trusts Scholarship in the Biomedical Sciences (A.S.), RPB CDA, Thome Foundation (BWJ), NIH EY02576, NIH EY015128, NSF 0941717, NIH EY014800 Vision Core (R.M.); NIH 5R01EY18608, AFOSR FA9550- 10-1-0503, DoD W81XWH-12-10575, Stanford University Bio-X (D.P.), Edward N. and Della L. Thome Memorial Foundation grant for Age-Related Macular Degeneration Research (BWJ) RPB unrestricted award (Moran Eye Center)

This abstract was presented today at the Association for Research in Vision and Opthalmology (ARVO) meetings in Seattle, Washington by Crystal L. Sigulinsky, J. Scott Lauritzen, John V. Hoang, Carl B. Watt, myself, James R. Anderson, Shoeb Mohammed and Robert E. Marc.

A full size pdf of the poster can be downloaded here.

This abstract was presented today at the Association for Research in Vision and Opthalmology (ARVO) meetings in Seattle, Washington by J. Scott Lauritzen, John V. Hoang, Crystal Sigulinsky, myself, James R. Anderson, Carl B. Watt, Shoeb Mohammed and Robert E. Marc.

This abstract was presented today at the Association for Research in Vision and Opthalmology (ARVO) meetings in Seattle, Washington by Robert E. Marc, Felix R. Vazquez-Chona, John V. Hoang, Crystal Sigulinsky, Carl B. Watt, myself, James R. Anderson and J. Scott Lauritzen.

Purpose:  In theory pure feedforward amacrine cells could exist, but no proof of has ever emerged. We mined 100 GABA+ ACs (γACs) and glycine+ ACs in rabbit retinal connectome RC1 (Anderson et al., MolVis, 2011) to establish the existence, connectivity and statistics of feedforward inhibitory elements.

Methods:  AC, bipolar cell (BC), and ganglion cell (GC) processes were traced in the ultrastructural rabbit retinal connectome RC1, annotated with the Viking viewer, and explored by 3D rendering and graph visualization (Anderson et al. 2009 PLoS Biology; Anderson et al. 2011. J Microscopy; Anderson et al. 2011 MolVis). RC1 contains embedded intrinsic small molecule signals enabling complete cellular classification, contains excitation marker signals to flickering blue/yellow light stimulation, and has a resolution of 2 nm, enabling identification of all synapses and gap junctions.

Results:  We discovered a single class of γAC that is exclusively feedforward. The interstitial AC (IAC) is a GABA+ cell with its soma positioned directly in the middle of the inner plexiform layer (IPL). One instance of the IAC is cell 9769 in RC1. Its soma is located at the edge of the 0.243 mm diameter volume and its dendrites span the volume, suggesting the full cell is over 0.5 mm in diameter. It receives input from virtually every ON cone BC (CBb) it encounters including classes CBb3, CBb4, CBb5, CBb5w and CBbw. Cell 9769 is postsynaptic to 31 CBbs at 75 ribbon synapses and is presynaptic to none of the them. Cell 9769 is presynaptic to several wide-field ON cone feedback and cone-rod crossover γACs and two classes of ON GCs. It is also coupled to a large GABA+ GC. No other kinds of pure feedforward ACs have yet been found.

Conclusions:  IACs are very large cells that appear to have the role of copying the entire ON cone BC signal pool (via sign-inverting GABA synapses) forward onto a select set of ON driven targets, including two classes of retinal GCs. IACs also provide nested feedforward to feedback γACs. IACs tile rather than cover the image plane, so they may effectively measure the size of looming background structures and provide a framework for spatial and temporal antagonism that can refine the effects of feedback γACs. They are also coupled to a third class of GABA+ GCs and may transfer a very large aggregate sign-conserving, but non-amplified ON signal.

Support:  NIH Grants EY02576, EY015128, EY014800 Vision Core, NSF 0941717, RPB Career Dev Award (BWJ), RPB unrestricted award (Moran Eye Center)

This poster was presented today at the Association for Research in Vision and Opthalmology (ARVO) meetings in Seattle, Washington by Steven J. Fliesler, Christopher C. Goulah, W. Drew Ferrell, Robert E. Marc and myself.  The full size pdf of the poster can be downloaded here.

This is the fourth in a series of posts on my first visit to Cuba.  Click these links for parts one, two and three.

We had a chance to visit the Escuela Nacional Cubana de Ballet or the Cuban National Ballet School in Havana.  The school was started back in 1931 by Alicia Alonso and continues to this day.  I was eager to visit the school partially because of Alicia Alonso’s history of vision problems, specifically a detached retina.  It is because of my study of vision that photography has become so important to me, so people’s stories as they’ve overcome visual deficits inspire me.

Alecia formed the company in Havana that would eventually become the Escuela Nacional Cubana de Ballet in 1948 and then going on to dance in Moscow and Paris.  After the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro’s claim to power, Alecia returned to Havana to to create the ballet school and to this day, in her 90′s and partially blind, directs the Ballet Nacional de Cuba.

The introductory image of a ballerina in training at the top was made while she watched others rehearse for a performance.  I loved the intimacy of the image as the ballerina stretched and watched the other dancers perform and rehearse.

To get these shots, I was shooting through an open window at a mirrored wall with a 70-300 zoom lens so that I was looking at reflections in a rehearsal mirror (see the outtakes below).  Dave Kile got some similar images shooting from inside the room as shown in the outtakes at the bottom of this entry and here.

This shot was a bit of a pirate shot, capitalizing on a couple of other photographers posing of one of the ballerinas.  I was quite a bit behind Matteo and Mark Heaps and poached this shot.

Walking around the school, I came across this dancer stretching.  I am thinking that this could be considered a stress position in “enhanced interrogation” if anyone other than a dancer were to experience this.  I loved the pose as a rather matter of fact, every day kind of thing even though this position would have snapped every tendon in my body.

The performances and rehearsals that we got to see were amazing.  These feet belong to a husband and wife team who were on stage when we showed up.  They were amazing and this was the best I came up with from their performance.  Duncan managed a proper portrait of them in his post, Bridging The Gap.

Outtakes:

This is the third in a series of posts on my first visit to Cuba.  Click these links for parts one and two.

One of the very first places we visited in Cuba was a short walk from our hotel through Old Havana to the Rafael Trejo Boxing Gym or the Rafael Trejo Gimnasio al Aire Libre.  The gym, like many places in Cuba was named in memory of a revolutionary figure, this time after Rafael Trejo who was a Cuban law student, killed in 1930 during protests against the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado.

The gym, like many places in the crumbling streets of Havana is easy to miss from the street and marked by a single, small sign.  Walking through the door you enter perhaps the oldest boxing club in Havana, an open air arena nestled in the center of a courtyard with seating on two sides, nestled in-between a couple of three level apartment buildings with windows open to the training area.  Like just about everything in Cuba, the training equipment is well worn with the exception of a brand new heavy (70-80lb) punching bag.  Despite its well worn and neglected appearance, it is one of the more famous boxing arenas with a number of Olympic champions having trained here.

I was pretty excited to see this place as this is about as fundamental and raw as boxing gets.  However, we arrived late morning and the light inside the gym was atrocious with all sorts of harsh highlights coupled with shadows underneath the awning.  Keeping exposures under control was a nightmare as people moved from light to shadow, but I figured some of that could be an advantage, especially with RAW files that give you a little bit of extra dynamic range.  The gym was also a relatively small place and having even a few photographers moving around along with boxing students and others made it a pretty tough environment to shoot in.  But when was I going to get back here?  Might as well suck it up and make it work…

Boxing is perhaps Cuba’s second most favorite sport behind baseball and apparently folks of all ages come here to train.  Today however, were boxers in their 20′s that were there were in pretty good shape with a couple exhibiting  fierce and sharp reflexes.  After watching for a few minutes, I was asked who I’d least want to get into the ring with and I responded that the two people I would not have wanted to tangle with were the old guy who was doing the instruction at the school, pictured above (incredibly fast, precise and controlled) and the young woman pictured at top, who was *in it*.  Apparently, the instructor was a 5 time Cuban national champion…  Unfortunately, I did not get their names as I did not want to interrupt their training, but it was a pleasure to have the opportunity to watch them train.

Outtakes:

Duncan shot this image from this entry, pretty much where he was sitting in this picture.

Erik Couse shown immediately above, shot this image from the gym.

Links to other images others in our group shot.

Dave Cohen shot these images from our visit.

Brandon Downey shot the following images:  Under Wraps, Eye of the Tiger and an epic image titled Monster in the Ring.

Dave Kile shot this image, this image and this image from our visit.

Aaron D’Souza shot this image.

Vincent Mo shot this image.

Matteo Slanina shot this image.

This is the 2nd post in a series of posts on Cuba.  The first is here.

A few months ago I got one of those emails that you just have to say yes to.  The deal was an opportunity to travel to Cuba (legally) on a US State Department visa for a “people to people cultural exchange”.  We would be representing the United States of America to the people of Cuba and experiencing both Cuban culture and getting to know the people there through the context of photography.  Santa Fe Workshops helped coordinate the operation, taking care of hotel accommodations as well as organizing local Cuban and US handlers and fixers and they did a fantastic job.  My other goal for this trip was to initiate contact for a research project with the Moran Eye Center to perform genetic research and despite a bump or two, it looks like that might proceed with Meg DeAngelis‘ lab heading that up.

As luck would have it, David Hobby was chosen to select participants for this unusual trip and he ended up curating an eclectic group of some of the most interesting people around who also turn out to be *excellent* photographers.  Not everyone knew one another, but Hobby did an excellent job and we all made fast friends.  More on that in a later post.

Fortunately, because of the official visa, we were able to meet in Miami, Florida and fly direct to Havana, Cuba.  The trick to getting to Cuba as an American citizen, subject to current US embargo restrictions, is to go on a specific visa granted by the State Department.  Entering Cuba is fairly typical of a modern country and certainly much easier than the last Communist State I got to see, North Korea.  That is not to say that Americans do not get into Cuba via other means via Mexico or Canada or as we found out, fairly extensively through the Bahamas.  The problem with going to Cuba illegally is that you are there without official permission or sanction and for some individuals in certain lines of work, that could prove problematic.  It also means that if you get into any trouble through accident or happenstance, you are on your own.

The downside of going legally right now at least, is that we could not bring back *anything* except art or music.  This means no rum, no cigars and nothing of commercial or political nature.  Its OK though, because we sampled said rum and cigars through some of the finest opportunities one might be able to experience.  More on that later as well.

There are other ways for American citizens to go to Cuba with official blessing which includes journalism, educational or research purposes or increasingly, for Americans who have family still in Cuba.  While Americans in Cuba are a rarity, especially in some of the places we were going to, it is becoming more common in the tourist areas to find American citizens.   We ran into Americans from Colorado, New York, California and elsewhere.

Flying to Cuba from Miami used to be quite common before the Communist Revolution in Cuba and with modern travel, it is a trivially easy affair that takes all of 45 minutes.  Duncan brought a GoPro camera and captured some excellent time-lapse video of the trip over and back.  Hopefully he’ll have that up on his blog at some point in the near future.

The travel restrictions do strike one as parochial, but as the last vestiges of the Cold War disappear, it seems especially absurd that one cannot travel from country to country because of conflicted governmental relations.  Every US President since Eisenhower has kept the same policy towards Cuba, but its time things change.  The world is getting ever smaller and smaller and the divide between Cuba and the USA is slowly shrinking as the Obama administration is slowly relaxing travel restrictions.

Cuba too realizes that tourist dollars are increasingly going to be the way forward for a country that has seen things change dramatically over the past few years.  The Capitol building in Havana seen above during sunrise is one such example that is being extensively refurbished to function as a museum, not just for cuban citizens, but also for visitors/tourists to Cuba.

The reality is, the rest of the world is coming to Cuba and there are opportunities for both the Cuban people and Americans.  There will be problems and we certainly saw immediate evidence of that, but the potential for a mutually beneficial relationship is there and is, I believe inevitable.  Cubans are increasingly aware of the outside world with its products and services and there is a demand.  We even saw a number of Cubans with Apple iPhones, though Duncan claims that most of them were without data plans.

There are extensive opportunities for eco-tourism if Cubans can be good stewards of their unique environment.  There are opportunities for collectors of automobiles to visit Cuba, more on that in a later post as well.  There are opportunities for trade in organically produced fruits and vegetables from Cuba if Cubans can get back on the farming way of life and many other opportunities.  I’ll have more to say on this later as well following our visit to a couple of farms in the mountains of Cuba.

The history of Cuba’s economy is interesting.  After the pullout of Russia, Cuba’s economy has been essentially dependent upon its relationship with Venezuela, but with recent elections there, it will be interesting to see what happens with that relationship.  Cuba is moving forward however, and investing itself into more and more tourism as other European countries are starting to invest.  Cuba has realized that they must change and are now starting to allow foreign investment with the Cuban government maintaining a 51% controlling interest in foreign run/managed operations.  The hotel we stayed in for instance, the Hotel Parque Central is operated by a Spanish company, Iberostar.

Other hotels in Havana, Cuba are being renovated on aggressive schedules to take advantage of tourist dollars like the hotel on the left here seen from our hotel room window.  Cuba has realized that much of what makes Havana special is the architecture of the buildings and hotels.  As such, preservation and development of these buildings and neighborhoods has become a central mission of the Oficina del Historiador de la Cuidad de la Habana.  This effort has resulted in the center of Havana becoming a UNESCO site and the hopes are that continued investment and revitalization will help with rebuilding a city that has become deteriorated through lack of infrastructure and resources for the past 60 years.

Along with the hotels will come cuisine.  There are some rather exceptional opportunities for cuisine in Cuba, but most restaurants are still figuring out the formula for operating on a truly international stage.  Even some of the higher end restaurants are lacking that certain finesse needed to compete, but things…are…*rapidly* changing.

Everyone we spoke to is excited, hopeful and perhaps a little worried about what may happen with Cuba.  Taxi drivers, professionals, construction workers, shop workers and people on the street are all hopeful that the current Raúl Castro led government will lead them, slowly perhaps into the next phase for Cuba.

Alexander Sher, myself, Philip Huie, Yannis M. Paulus, Loh-Shan S. Leung, Hiroyuki Nomoto, Robert E. Marc and Daniel Palanker have a new manuscript out in the Journal of Neuroscience.

This manuscript explores the extent of functional restoration of the retinal network including the questions of re-establishment of synaptic connections by migrating photoreceptors with the deafferented bipolar cells located inside the lesion, and the extent of the functional restoration of the OFF- and ON- pathways within the retina.  The restoration of retinal circuitry and responses not only demonstrate the existence of constructive adult mammalian retinal plasticity leading towards restoration of normal retinal circuitry after injury, but it also reveals a new approach to the clinical practice of laser-photocoagulation to treat diabetic retinopathy and wet forms of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) as well as other vascular diseases of the retina.  Essentially, instead of using a broad laser beam to burn and seal off large areas of retina, we used patterned laser beams to cut thin channels and allowing adjacent photoreceptors to migrate into the channels, preventing complete loss of vision in those regions.  The effect of photoreceptor migration over the laser lesion opens the door to immediately relevant, new clinical approaches to retinal photocoagulation therapy which would allow restoration of continuity of the photoreceptor layer, thereby avoiding the retinal scarring and loss of vision in those regions

The plasticity questions are interesting and have multiple significant implications.  A large number of studies rely on retinal laser lesions as a model for investigation of cortical plasticity, assuming that retinal function in the lesions is lost permanently.  Restoration of retinal sensitivity in the lesions might affect interpretations of these studies.  Furthermore, the process of reconnection between photoreceptors and the inner retinal neurons is important for guiding studies aimed at restoration of sight in degenerate retina through genetic manipulation of the existing or surgical reintroduction of new retinal cells.

We got off the plane from Cuba earlier this evening and there are so many thoughts running through my head right now.  Cuba is a complicated, beautiful, frustrating, historic place with a people that are both gracious and proud.  This trip was tremendous and I am currently incapable of summarizing this trip.  I suspect that I’ll have more to say in a series of posts about our experiences in Cuba that will emerge over time, but there is so much to say and so much imagery that it will take some time and thought.

The short of it is that I had an amazing opportunity to go on a State Department license to visit Cuba with a phenomenal collection of individuals including David Hobby, James Duncan Davidson, Aaron D’Souza, Dave Kile, Mark Heaps, Matteo Slanina, Brandon Downey, Erik Couse, Parisa Trabriz, Dana Wagner, Bob Lee, Vincent Mo, Dave Cohen and Waldemer Horwart.  All of these people touched me professionally and personally and I look forward to continued investment and cultivation of these relationships.  Thanks everyone.

The photos included in this post are a sampling of my top six photos from this trip that are going to frame later posts that I’ll elaborate on the individual experiences more after I’ve had some time to digest what we’ve experienced individually and collectively.  Honestly, I really struggled with how to organize the photographs from Cuba.  We experienced so much and met so many amazing people, that organizing a discrete set of photos from the trip is a challenge and these six do not even come close to describing what we experienced.

The week screamed by and its taken me days of mental decompressing just to start to make sense and put in context what we experienced.  Duncan had been to Cuba two years before, so he had some additional context, but for most of us, it was wide open and brand new and unlike any other place on the planet.  So, the solution for Jonesblog at least, is to make a sequence of posts that will be smaller vignettes of what we experienced with links to what others may post to give an idea of the collective experience.  This and subsequent posts on Cuba will I hope, provide some insight into the vast divide that exists between the U.S. and Cuba, despite the close geographical proximity.

The image above kind of summarizes the Cuban experience on the street to me.  Amazing architecture and streets that verge on a post-apocalyptic future with elements of the past coursing around them.  There are tens of thousands of 1950′s American cars for instance sharing the roads with people, an increasing number of tourists and pedicabs designed to ferry people around at low cost.  The light that courses through these streets can be absolutely spectacular and on this warm Havana evening, Duncan and I simply sat on some steps and watched the world go by.  I loved watching the light play along the streets as it set.

The first night that we were in Havana, it rained… and rained hard which made for some spectacular photography opportunities.  Honestly, I had wished that it would have rained every night, but all we got was the first night.  This was one image out of many that I was trying to put together by panning and dragging the shutter.

I loved this game of dominoes that was being played out in a retirement home in Old Havana.  I had walked in the room and Aaron D’Souza had sat down to play a game of dominoes with three of the residents and was doing a pretty good job holding his own until this gentleman went on a scoring rampage and ultimately, victory.

This image was a pretty high ISO image (ISO 4000) taken in a photo review by one of the local Cuban photographers that was showing his work.  I loved the colors in this image which is emblematic of so much amazing color in Cuba.  The blues, browns and the *yellow shoes* just put it over the top for me.  Its far more colorful than Andrew Wyeth, but somehow evocative to me of his work… I’m not sure why or how yet, but that was the first imagery that came to mind when shooting this image.

This image of a boxer was taken on a day we visited a local boxing school.  The students were amazingly intense and focused on their work and training under the leadership of a gentleman in his 60′s that amongst all of the people in that school, I would least like to get into the ring with.  The instructor, even though much older than the students was precise and fierce in his boxing instruction.

This image of a ballerina in training was perhaps my favorite image of the trip with the caveat that I’ve not gone through all of the photographs yet.  This ballerina was watching others rehearse for a performance in a smallish rehearsal room at the pre-eminent ballet school in Cuba, the Escuela Nacional Cubana de Ballet.  Getting this shot was possible only because of a small ledge outside the rehearsal space where I was shooting through an open window at a mirrored wall with a 70-300 zoom lens so that I was looking at her reflection in the mirror.  No other shooting position I explored would have given this angle where I could see this intimacy of observation and instruction.

My flight did not leave until later in the afternoon, so on my way out of Washington D.C., I met up with Xeni Jardin for breakfast and wonderful conversation, hoping she could have joined us for a visit out to the Udvar-Hazy Center.  Unfortunately, she could not make the visit, but I’ll look forward to the next time we can chat.  Xeni, the museum is totally awesome and completely worth your time.

Right after breakfast, Erik Couse stopped by to pick me up and give me a ride out to the airport.  Our scheme was to visit the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center for a couple of hours before I jumped on the plane to fly back to Salt Lake.

This is the scene that greeted us as we walked into the Udvar-Hazy Center.  You can get a full resolution, 4096 pixel wide image of this here.  Right in front, you have a P-40 Warhawk and an F4U Corsair in front of an SR-71 Blackbird with the Space Shuttle Discovery peeking out from the space gallery behind.  On the right you have Vietnam War era jet fighters as well as surface to air missiles and on the left, some of the most rare collections of both WWI and WWII aircraft in the world as well as the Concorde and other commercial aircraft like the Boeing 307 and a Boeing 707 and even a Junkers Ju-52.

The Udvar-Hazy Center was part of the Air and Space Museum that I’ve never actually seen before and man, was it totally worth it.  Its much quieter than the downtown Air and Space Museum with many fewer people and the history contained in those buildings is amazing.  The Shuttle Discovery of course is one of the highlights and made for a completion of sorts from the last time I saw a space shuttle up close.

Like most things in this place, its hard to actually capture the full size in a single frame.  Panoramas are the way to go and I love the iPhone panorama feature for shots like this.  You can get the full resolution 5936 pixel wide image of this here and it was even featured on BoingBoing here.

The thing that I liked about the Shuttle Discovery exhibit was that they did not clean it up.  The Air and Space Museum decided to keep it raw… just like it entered the atmosphere last.

They also had one of the most amazing aircraft ever built, the SR-71 as a central exhibit.  There is a pretty rare SR-71 up at Hill AFB that we visited on a photowalk a while ago, so I had some experience trying to figure out how to shoot the Blackbird.  The trouble with photographing this plane in an enclosed space is that its long, black and sleek.  Without some significant setup time and effort, its tough to get the whole aircraft in the frame.  So, given the limited time on this trip, I focused on the details.  I’d love to come back to photograph it some time and take the time to light it and really do it right.

The Enola Gay is also present and completely restored.  The history of this aircraft is so big, its kind of hard to imagine the kind of history that comes with this particular aircraft.  Anyone interested in airplanes pretty much knows about this aircraft and its role in history, so it was both somber and intriguing to be able to get up close and see the real aircraft that I had built a 1/48 scale model of when I was a kid.

The Udvar-Hazy facility also has two of the wildest looking and rarest combat aircraft in the world, the world’s only surviving Dornier Do 335 and the Arado 234.  These are two of the strangest and yet most advanced aircraft ever to come out of WWII.  Had the German leadership at the time been more competent, these aircraft could have been more damaging to the US and Allies.

The Northrop N-9M flying wing was another interesting and rare aircraft.  Back in the fall of 1989, I was on a ranch in Nevada where I saw this strange line in the sky that kept rolling back and forth.  The rancher I was with was also looking at it and we had no idea what it was we were seeing.  Anything we might have been thinking was kept completely to ourselves…  Eventually, it got close enough and banked off for us to see that it was a *huge* black flying wing.  This it turned out was the B-2 bomber right around when it made its first flights.  After seeing that it was an airplane, the rancher exclaimed “Oh, shoot… I saw those back in the 40′s”.  I though he was nuts, but he was of course, right.

I’ve seen Concorde aircraft in New York on the Intrepid Museum and as a gate guardian at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris.  But this was the first time that I’ve actually been able to get up close.  In some ways its a massive aircraft, but in others, you can see how narrow the fuselage actually was.    Despite the aircraft’s huge size, it only carried 90-100 passengers.  That said, I would have loved to have flown in it.

Thanks Erik!  It was good to meet up and talk.  I’ll be looking forward to the next adventure, which according to my watch, is coming up fast… :-)

P.S.  All kinds of cool, this post got mentioned on BoingBoing!

I was fortunate to be able to spend some time with friends and colleagues Wai T. Wong and Wei Li the night before the talk/work and dine with them at a delicious Sichuan restaurant.  We got to talk about some very cool work in microglia that Wai and Wei are doing as well as talk about retinal structure and alterations in retinal circuitry that Wei is investigating.  I’ll look forward to more discussions there…

Robert Fariss and I had a great meeting where we talked about retinal degeneration and remodeling, then I got a tour of the imaging core facilities that Robert manages at the NEI.  Robert wrote one of the most important papers to my PhD dissertation in retinal remodeling back in 2003 and for that, I will always be grateful.

My friend Michael Redmond and I got to talk about science and birds…  Michael recently went to Costa Rica and photographed some of the most amazing birds that I would totally love to see one of these days.  Its always fun to run into Michael at various meetings, even when it is unexpected in various corners of the world.

I did not get to spend much time walking around and exploring NIH, but on the way out to the parking lot, I saw this relief on the elevator doors in the National Institutes of Health hospital.  This relief, *I think*, tells the story of Dr. Ronald Ross, a British doctor who received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1902 for his work on malaria.  The amazing thing is how important this was for the concept of public health.  During WWII for instance, the most fundamentally important health hazard (aside from combat) in the South Pacific was malaria with over 500,000 soldiers infected and 60,000 troops died in the Africa and South Pacific campaigns.

After a long day of talks, meetings and research, I had the good fortune of meeting up with some friends at Churchkey for some rather tasty beer and the most amazing grilled cheese sandwich.  Samer Farha works for Thomson Reuters as a technical specialist and who’s work I’ve been following for some time on Flickr.  Recently, we were more formally introduced on Twitter by a mutual close friend of ours, Melinda… Its a really small world folks…  At any rate, it was finally good to meet up with him, exchange stories and share a meal.

Lauren Worley from NASA joined us and had known Samer from Twitter.  Turns out that Lauren knew and worked with other mutual friends which always… always amazes me how small the world is becoming.  You think that you are branching out, meeting new people and the degrees of separation are shrinking all the time.

Jonathan Gitlin also showed up which was *very cool* to finally meet him in person.  Jonathan is a science policy analyst from the National Institutes of Health National Human Genome Research Institute.  I’ve actually been following Jonathan for years starting back when he was writing for Ars Technica, then on Twitter.  The funny thing was running into Jonathan and his wife, Elle at IAD the next day as I was flying back to SLC and they were flying to Morocco.  It was nice to see you guys and share a bottle of wine.  I’ll look forward to the next time.

Thanks to Jonathan, Lauren and Samer for meeting up.  It was good to put faces to electrons and get a chance to talk in person and share a meal.  I’ll look forward to the next opportunity.