This is yet another example of the enormous damage inflicted on our country by our populist government. Fortunately, the Dutch people have clearly spoken out in recent elections, against the radical voices in society. This offers some hope that a future government can rectify this monstrous mistake.

In particular, in case a new funding source for the maintenance of the primate facility at BPRC can not be found, it can directly jeopardize the development of effective and safe vaccines in future pandemics, as well as the advancement of novel neurotechnologies.

Thereby going against the explicit advice of all the relevant scientific and medical advisory boards, including the Ministry of Science and Education, the University Medical Centres, the medical section of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences, and the recent recommendations from the Bijker committee.

Thanks for sharing. Too bad the trial wasn't succesful.

It's amazing to me that the functional relevance of this basic cortical architecture is still unknown. There is a lot of theory why columnar organization would be useful, i.e. fast & robust communication. But it remains hard to investigate experimentally, combining functional with anatomical imaging

You probably also know that Patricia Goldman-Rakic showed that columnar organization in PFC matches anatomical projections from contra- vs ipsilateral parietal cortex, so not necessarily visual features:
doi.org/10.1126/scie...
Although she also linked it to visual features :
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Indeed, the imaging is impressive, but the stimulus selection seems a bit arbitrary to me. There is columnar organization in terms of connectivity across the visual cortex, but only in V1, this has been linked to function, and only for relatively local connections it seems :
doi.org/10.1007/s004...

It's an cool paper, but not very rigorous I would say. In particular, I would assume that neurons in IT connect using features that are topographically organized. See e.g. these paper, I assume you know:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
and Figure 3 in :
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Fantastic piece indeed! Very clear and convincing. Would you maybe be willing to also share this on LinkedIn?

The deadline is extended to Friday May 9th, as there were some technical issues with the application portal due to the large number of last minute applications.

The deadline is extended to Friday May 9th, as there were some technical issues with the application portal due to the large number of last minute applications.

One week left to apply!