Studying, and managing, brainpower

It was the day President John F. Kennedy was shot that Mark Bear took an interest in the human brain.

"People in my generation have that flashbulb memory of the assassination," says Bear, 49. "I remember that before he died, there was a lot of chatter about whether the president, having lost a part of his brain, would be able to speak." Listening to the radio coverage of the president's condition, the young Bear, then 6, marveled at the idea that one particular spot in the "bowl of jelly" inside the human skull was responsible for speech.

That Christmas, he asked his parents for a toy brain-modeling kit. He's now the director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT.

Bear added the position to his lab work at the institute, where he investigates how sensory experience and deprivation physically change the structure and function of the cerebral cortex.

"Every psychiatric disorder comes from the neurons in the brain, and our instruments for treating them are very blunt," says Bear. Recent innovations in circuit genetics have opened the possibility of developing drugs to target specific neurons and circuits within the brain and then turn them on or off without damaging them. Formerly, the only way to experiment on the brain was to burn a lesion into a specific area and watch the consequences. "It's a bit draconian to burn holes in the brain," observes Bear. "Those cells aren't going to come back."

Bear received his first taste of scientific glory as an undergraduate at Duke University. His faculty adviser had him shoot a tracer into part of the brain of a tree shrew and establish a connection that hadn't been proven before. "They were breaking out champagne," recalls Bear. It was at that moment that he realized there were huge discoveries left to be made in the field.

Bear went on to graduate school at Brown University. Apart from a brief postdoctoral intermission to work at Germany's renowned Max Planck Institute, he stayed at Brown for 17 years, helping found its neuroscience department.

"People often don't understand what it is to be a scientist at my level," he says. "I'm the head coach. I'm the Bill Belichick, and I've got a lab full of star scientists. My job is to make them work together in the most effective way."

His lab's insights into the molecular mechanism for memory -- showing how learning alters the hippocampus -- were cited by Science magazine as a runner-up for "Breakthrough of the Year" in 2006.. In addition, they've made advances that may lead to a treatment of Fragile X syndrome, a cause of mental retardation.

Bear, however, is hardly the picture of a scientist in a white lab coat, his nose in a test tube. Rather, he's affable, eloquent, and speaks with a confident humor of a good manager. He'll need these traits in his new job. Bear replaces the Picower's founding director, Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa, who stepped down last year after he was accused of discouraging a young neuroscientist from accepting a job at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research because she would have been competing with his own work. The controversy soured relations between the Picower and the McGovern, both of which are in the same opulent building on Vassar Street.

"I feel like Truman did when FDR died," says Bear. "There were a number of qualified faculty members who could have stepped in. But I don't like taking on responsibility unless I can do a good job."

Although Bear is only going to serve as head of the Picower for a year while a permanent director is recruited, people have high expectations.

"He's going to be a great leader," says Julie Kauer, a professor of neuroscience at Brown University. "He's very straightforward, and very disarming. He's got the personality to bring MIT's neuroscience departments closer together."

Fact sheet

Hometown: Bristol, R.I.

Family: Wife, Terry, daughters Kendall, 19, a student, and Ashley, 24, now pursuing a career in neuroscience.

Hobbies: "Sailing's a huge part of my life." Bear races Lasers, small one- person boats, and competes every year in the world championships. "It's a great distraction because when you're racing, you can't be thinking about anything else."

Ambitions: To have an impact on science. "You don't work just to satisfy your curiosity. You want to influence the field, and, beyond that, maybe you can improve human health."