Dr.James D.Watson (National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI)_genome.com)

The 1962 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, James D. Watson, accompanied by Ann-Shyn Chiang, the director of the Brain Research Center at National Tsing Hua University (NTHU), visited the NARL's National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) on April 3, 2010 to review the application of computing resources in life sciences. 

Dr. Watson is best known as one of co-discoverers of the double helix structure of DNA. From 1968 he served as the director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) on Long Island, New York, USA, subsequently as its president for ten years from 1994, and then as its chancellor until 2007. The CSHL is a private, non-profit institution with research programs focusing on cancer, neurobiology, plant genetics, genomics and bioinformatics. Its neuroscience research on the neural circuits of the brain was significantly expanded in the recent years. Dr. Watson's visit to the NARL-NCHC was part of the fact-finding trip on the recent development of neuroscience research in Taiwan.

Since 2004, the NARL-NCHC, the NTHU, and the CSHL have collaborated on the research project "FlyBrain Neurogenomic", which aims at mapping the 3D gene expression patte and functional neural circuits, and 3D visualization of individual neurons in Drosophila. Much of the project's significant results have been published in international jouals. In due course, the project will serve as an open-access database for online archiving, cell type inventory, browsing, searching, analysis and 3D visualization of individual neurons in the standard model brain of male and female Drosophila adults. Toward this end, the NARL-NCHC is responsible for planning, establishing and pROViding services related to the 3D informatics database system for research and teaching purposes.