Erstellt am: 24. 3. 2012 - 10:38 Uhr

Inside Austria's Elite University

A visit to the Institute of Science and Technology at Gugging

In a darkened laboratory at the Austrian Institute of Science and Technology (IST) in Gugging, Lower Austria, a rather cute looking brown and white rat is scrabbling around what looks like a horizontal circular clock face. The black circle is marked with small white sensors.

The rat has a conical contraption on his head; much like a metallic witch’s hat. It`s lit by two red lights and is attached by a long wire to the ceiling. When he puts his claws on one particular sensor a white food pellet falls from the ceiling and he gobbles it up. The rat's progress is being followed by white-coated Joseph O'Neill, a postdoctoral neuroscientist: “We want to understand what goes on in the brain while an animal learns and forms new memories.”

The idea of this space-age cheeseboard is to study the workings of the rat's brain. Gradually he will cease to experiment and will remember exactly where the sensor with the food reward is found and will go straight there. “We’ll be able to monitor what happens in his brain, as he remembers,” says Doctor O’Neill.

After a few minutes, the O`Neill removes the wire and picks up the rat, helmet and all, giving him a stroke under the chin. The neuroscientist says the memory exercises of his furry friend might help us better understand the workings if the human brain since the hippocampus, the part of the brain being studied in this experiment, has a similar structure in both species and similar patters appear when memory becomes engrained. “It is much easy to use a rat as a model,” says O’Neill.

http://ist.ac.at

That is largely because the scientists have drilled into the rat's skull - you don't get many human volunteers with this sort of experimental surgery. The experiment might therefore seem cruel, even in the name of scientific advancement, but O'Neill defends his work: “It is extremely important for us that suffering is kept to a minimum, or removed entirely, because a stressed animal wouldn’t remember anything,” The surgery is performed under normal veterinary procedure and the animal is given strong pain killers.

Compassion only goes so far - when the experiment is over and he has served his purpose the rat will be killed. But Dr. O'Neill, who laughs off my accusation that he is the archetypal mad scientist, says Ratty will not have died in vain. “We know what we are looking for. We are studying the way the brain works and that is extremely important not just for our understanding of the world but also for medicine. If we are to develop new medicines we need to understand these things.”

The project coordinator, the Hungarian neuroscientist, Jozsef Csicsvari says it would not be impossible to spare the rat and use computer models : “The brain is really a very complex organ with so many parameters that it is just impossible to simulate.”

It's now 3 years since the science got underway at Maria Gugging on the outskirts of Klosterneuberg. At the end of February this year, the institute received a massive boost when the federal government in Vienna and the state of Lower Austrian committed themselves a 1.4 billion Euro grant that should secure the future of the IST until 2026. Communications officer Oliver Lehmann, who was guiding me around the complex, insists the taxpayers get value for their money: “They get back an institute with an internationally high visibility that can act as a light-house for Austrian science and can emphasize and pinpoint the excellence of Austrian science.

http://ist.ac.at

The square white buildings of the former psychiatric clinic have been converted into laboratories and conference rooms and cranes and building sites hint ambitious plans for expansion. The institute has already attracted 8 European Research Council (ERC) grants – the EU's most prestigious form of competitive funding. The University of Vienna has twice as many ERC but they are shared between 23 times as many scientists. It is a remarkable beginning.

Lehmann says the key to creating a successful scientific institute is attracting the right scientists who will “move science forwards”.

You need the right facilities and environment to attract them in the first place, but success or failure lies in the brains that can be brought to Austria. At the moment 160 scientists are living and working on campus - professors, doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows from 35 countries although eventually the community could expand to 2,000 scientists.

There are neuroscientists like O'Neill, computer scientists, evolutionary biologists and cell biologists – including the 38 year old cell biologist Michael Sixt. He left the prestigious Max-Planck-Institut in Munich to take part in this new Austrian experiment. The fact that 3000 scientists have applied for professorships at the institute speaks for its international standing. The competition is tight – only 36 made it to the interview stage. Lehmann is confident that Gugging is now home to some of the world's very best scientists.

Sixt's colleague in the cell biology cluster, Dara Siekhaus, is one of the newest arrivals. She has previously researched in such prestigious institutions as Stanford, Berkeley and at the New York University Medical Center but, despite this impressive curriculum vitae, she says she is impressed with her new posting. It's the atmosphere at Gugging that the US scientist appreciates – Siekhaus describes her fellow scientists as “creative, smart and interactive” and says that the personal contact and exchange of ideas will make her work both “more successful and more fun to do.”

Siekhaus is using fruit flies trying to understand how cells move through barriers. That's important because cells do this during the spread of cancer and when immune cells chase down infection. With so much public money spent on the institute, this is the sort of practical minded research that appeals to the tax-payer. But it is often curiosity that drives the scientists on: “We do it because we are excited about discovering something new,” says Siekhaus, “but I did choose a field which I knew could have potential benefits. That motivates and excites me and I understand that I`m funded by the taxpayers and they would like to see something useful as a result.”

But she urges us to be patient with the research. It is not a linear process and there are no guarantees: “We keep knocking on doors and hoping that we will find a room full of something interesting, but you have to knock on a lot of doors to find that room.” She says science journalism fails to reflect that process, neglecting to report on how much failure is necessary to pave the way for success or “the amount of frustration we endure to reach happiness.” As a result she fears that the public “doesn't understand the way that since works.” She'd also like to see scientific breakthroughs more prominently covered: “There is so much excitement and conveying that would help the public participate more in the discovery process and joy that occurs.”

There is plenty of discoveries still to me made in the field of neuroscience. The Columbus moment lies in the future not the past. 22 years ago, the US congress designated the 1990s the “Decade of the Brain”, hoping that the secrets of neuroscience might be readily cracked with the right funding, but today, scientists generally agree that we are right at the beginning of the exploration of man's most complex organ. “Everywhere we go in modern brain research there are new questions arising,” says IST neuroscientist Peter Jonas, who admits the field is both exciting and overwhelming.

http://ist.ac.at

His research might one day unlock to secrets to treatment of conditions such as schizophrenia, depression and epilepsy but the road ahead will be long with many false turns. Jonas' Hungarian colleague Jozsef Csicsvari points out that even in rats the brain is incredibly complicated: “In the small area of the brain we are studying there are 100000 neurons and each one is connected to others by thousands of connections.”

It is here, says Csisvari, that the Austrian Institute of Science and Technology comes into its own. The philosophy and organization of the “elite university” encourages collaboration between the fields. The evolutionary biologists collaborate and work in tandem with the cell biologists and the neuroscientists. Whatever their specialized field, the post-docs at the IST have to take courses and collaborate in projects in all four clusters of science. Csisvari says that his work can only progress with the assistance of the IST's computer scientists. “We collect very complicated data and we need their expertise to analyze it.”

It's ten years since professor Anton Zeilinger started promoting the need for an elite university in Austria and 7 years since then Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel asked his education minister Elisabeth Gehrer to develop the idea. Already Austria's IST is a well-known address for scientific research. The dream is starting to take shape. With its guaranteed billion dollar public funding it is the envy of other areas of higher education (even if the burden is partly shared by the private sector) but Lehmann insists that is money well spent:

“You have to invest in the future if you want to have a good future.”

Hear today's Reality Check special about Austria's Elite University: