Multidisciplinary connections and interfaces

The 3 rd Meeting on Immunological and Neurological Cognitive Mechanisms , was held on August 2014 at the campus of the Institute Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz) in Rio de Janeiro. Organized by Drs. Claudio Tadeu Daniel Ribeiro from Fiocruz and Sidarta Ribeiro from the Brain Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte as a joint effort of Fiocruz and the National Academy of Medicine. I was very much proud and happy for being chosen as the honorary chairman of the meeting. Besides the great honor of being remembered by your peers, this position allows you to choose a very good seat at the VIP area from which you can follow great lectures at the neurosciences and immunology interfaces without the obligation of preparing and delivering your own. For all of this I am very grateful to the organizers. Multi and trans disciplinary activities are at the forefront of modern sciences. As so, it is not surprising that Christopher Dye, director of the World Health Organization and Marcia McNutt, Chief Editor of Science, in a commentary on the United Nations Millenium Development Goals, have stated “The plain truth is that it is not clear how these goals will be met, but it is evident that to fill the development gap, we must fill the knowledge gap from many different sources. More than ever, multidisciplinary research must be treated not as a formulaic insert on grant applications but as an immediate development necessity”. If one agrees, and we have plenty of reasons and examples to do so, many of our present knowledge gaps will only be fulfilled by practicing multidisciplinary research. The problem is how to induce its practice. What strategies can be used to facilitate the interactivity of different research groups? How can one induce the practice of a real science without borders? I have no doubts that the organization of meetings with the same philosophy as the one now being discussed, can be a policy. If they will be fruitful only time and a thorough evaluation of their effectiveness will give us the answer. In the present one the idea is to build a “new” neuroimmunolgy aimed at constructing models describing similarities and homologies in cognitive mechanisms in the immunological and neurological systems. An analysis of the program shows that the description of the molecular mechanisms underlying the recognition of infectious and inflammatory agents, the phylogenetic origin of the capacity to recognize molecular patterns in those agents as well as the “use” of internal images for the recognition of objects from the real world (including microbes) are presented and discussed. In addition, a discussion of molecular mimicry is also made: structures present in myocardial fibers share similarities with structures present in an infective agent, and the consequence is a severe autoimmune disease targeting the heart. Neuroscientists, on their turn, presented and discussed themes on the neurological basis of the so-called motor anticipation, the connections in the social brain, the evolution of the psychological aspects of human behavior as well as dreams, memories and madness. It is now up to the participants and to the readers of the present volume to make their connections between the different lectures and from them generate new models, ideas and collaborations. I wish them success!