The 31st Annual Meeting of the Japan Neuroscience Society will be held at the Tokyo International Forum on the three days from July 9th to July 11th, 2008.
The goal of the Meeting will be to build bridges between a wide range of scientists with a variety of backgrounds in order to encourage the development of innovative and original basic research related to nerves. In recent years dramatic advances have been made in such fields as a comprehensive analytical approach in the biosciences epitomized by “omics”, the identification and description of functional molecules involved in developmental processes in the brain and higher functions, imaging technology that extracts information on brain function, and research on pathological mechanisms in neurological diseases, while, on the other hand, treatment strategies for brain diseases as a result of translational research that has drawn freely on novel technology, including RNA interference, which was the subject of the Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology in 2006, epigenetics, stem cell biology, and drug discovery based on molecular structure, are about to yield major developments. In addition, under circumstances in which common ground between the neurosciences and many other disciplines, including engineering, as represented by the brain-machine interface (BMI), educational theory, ethics, economics, etc., is also becoming clearer, I believe our major mission is to integrate this extremely widely divergent scientific information and create a setting in which new ideas flow from it.
We will take advantage of the geographic advantage of the Tokyo International Forum, which is located very close to Tokyo Station, and we sincerely hope that many scientists from a wide verity of fields related to the neurosciences, as well as persons engaged in other fields who have an interest in the nervous system, will participate and cultivate exchanges, and that a critical mass will be formed that will give birth to new currents in the neurosciences.

Hideyuki Okano (Department of Physiology, Keio University, School of Medicine)
Chair, 31st Annual Meeting of the Japan Neuroscience Society