Franklin Institute to honor 9 in celebration of brain power

One woman has devoted her career to understanding the brain of an animal that measures just 1 millimeter in length.

Another explores the brains of creatures with billions of neurons, whose ability with languages sets them apart from all other living things.

The two will have the chance for a pretty interesting conversation in April. Cornelia Bargmann, who studies the brain of a type of roundworm, and Elissa Newport, a prominent expert on how humans learn language, are among nine new winners of awards from the Franklin Institute, given each year to recognize achievement in the sciences and engineering.

The museum is formally announcing its 2015 class of winners Monday, also including a Princeton University climate scientist, two University of Pennsylvania physicists who helped discover a new class of materials that could boost energy efficiency in electronic circuits, and others in such diverse fields as cancer treatment and 3-D printing.

The nine receive their awards April 23 at a black-tie ceremony, where guests pay $500 and up for the privilege of mingling in the presence of some serious brain power. A 10th honoree, whose name has yet to be announced, will be commended for achievement in business leadership.

The institute has been giving out awards since 1825 to technically minded luminaries, among them 116 recipients who have gone on to win the Nobel Prize. The most recent such case is Shuji Nakamura, who won a Franklin Institute award in 2002 and shared this year's Nobel in physics for his work on blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

Among the nine new Franklin award winners, Newport, a Penn-trained psychologist who is a professor of neurology at Georgetown University, is one whose work will resonate with the young and old.

She studies why children's flexible brains are better than those of adults at learning languages, and whether that childhood "plasticity" can be reawakened in adults recovering from a stroke.

Research from her field has been popularly interpreted to mean that languages must be learned during a critical window from birth to age 3, but Newport said it was not so simple.

The ability to learn language declines gradually from early childhood until the late teens, when it plateaus, she said.

"There is something different about early exposure," Newport said. But the drop-off is "just not sudden, and it's just not absolute."

Her findings have come from studies of people whose families moved to the United States from Asia as children, and also of deaf people who learned sign language at varying ages.

On the other end of the brain spectrum is the research of Bargmann, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University in New York.

She studies the brain and behavior of Caenorhabditis elegans, a type of roundworm with just 302 neurons, compared with tens of billions in humans. Despite its small size, or perhaps because of it, this common lab animal is a powerful tool for understanding broader truths about the brain and behavior.

Bargmann and her colleagues are able to track the flow of electrochemical traffic in every single one of the worm's nerve cells and explore how it relates to the animal's behavior - an impossible task for the human brain.

Among her findings are that worms have innate, "hardwired" preferences for odors of certain beneficial substances and aversions to odors of other substances that are toxic. Later research has found similar traits in mammals; for example, humans evolved a dislike of bitter tastes because they are associated with some poisonous plants.

The two Penn physicists being honored are theorists Charles Kane and Eugene Mele, who conceived of a new class of materials that would come to be known as topological insulators.

Such materials consist of an inside layer that acts as an insulator and a surface layer that acts as an electrical conductor, Kane said. These materials are still in the early stages of development but hold promise for use in energy-efficient electronics and quantum computers. Stanford University's Shoucheng Zhang, who also works in this field, is sharing the Franklin physics medal with Kane and Mele.

One of the nine science awards, the Bower Award for Achievement in Science, comes with a $250,000 prize. The 2015 recipient is Jean-Pierre Kruth, of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, who is being recognized for his research on 3-D printing.

Each of the laureates participates in public events during the week leading up to the award ceremony. Among those planned is a symposium on women in science, in which Newport and Bargmann will take part, said Franklin Institute president and chief executive officer Larry Dubinski.

If the goal is to encourage participation in the sciences, one could hardly ask for a more effective pitch than Bargmann's description of what she likes about her work:

"The idea that you're actually discovering something about nature, interacting with nature in the lab, and that through that you can know something that no one has ever known before, it's beautiful and exciting."