Articles by Terry Mcdermott

On a warm autumn afternoon, toward the end of a daylong barrage of PowerPoint presentations, a white-haired, gentlemanly fellow named Michael Merzenich faced a room full of neuroscientists and pharmaceutical executives and declared that, really, they could all pack up and go home. Read more

SAN DIEGO – Just inside the stadium gate Monday, a young bleached-blond woman offered a drink: “Would you care for a Red Bull, sir?” Read more

Reflecting in the spring of 2005 on his lab’s recent successes, which he regarded as a culmination of decades of work, UC Irvine neuroscientist Gary Lynch said: “This will be a moment when all the tribes of neuroscience come to the same campfire.” Read more

Lynch Lab sits between a toll road and the UC Irvine main campus, in an office park of indistinguishable low-rise, beige-on-beige stucco buildings. Read more

The myth of modern science, that it proceeds carefully, rationally, incrementally, building bit by bit from rock-solid foundations to impregnable fortresses of fact, comes unraveled in contemporary neuroscience. Read more

The first time I spoke with the neuroscientist Gary Lynch, the conversation went something like this: Me: I’m interested in spending time in a laboratory like yours, where the principal focus is the study of memory. Read more

John McCain has gotten himself stuck in an almost inescapable political dilemma. Read more

IN a third-floor Flower District walkup with bare wooden floors, plain white walls and an excitable toy poodle named Simon, six guys dressed mainly in T-shirts and jeans sit all day in front of computer screens at desks arranged around the oblong room’s perimeter, pecking away at their keyboards and, bit by bit, at the media establishment. Read more

The airline bombing plot that British officials said they disrupted Thursday bears striking similarities to a 1995 plot hatched by Sept. Read more