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Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American posted on September 8th, 2009.

I'm Steve Murski. And in this episode, we'll chat with neuroscientist Dwayne Godwin from the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Plus, we'll test your knowledge of some recent science in the news.

I was down at Wake Forest recently to talk to graduate science students and met with Dwayne Godwin,

who coincidentally is an unusual regular contributor to Scientific American Mind magazine.

He's writing the stories for comic scripts about

brain science that appear on the back page of each issue of mind. We talk about that effort,

as well as his meetings with members of Congress, and the transformation of tobacco country

into a leading biomedical research region.

Tell me about this foray into cartoons that we're doing in Scientific American Mind. Well, it's an exciting new opportunity for me. I'm a practicing neuroscientist, and it was a challenge

that was very attractive to try to put one of the most complex things in the universe into the format of an illustrative narrative.

That complex thing being our brain.

Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely.

So this started, I guess, about two years ago, when Jorge Cham, who is a famous comic-stripped artist on his own, he does Ph.D. Comics, and is quite famous for that, as many graduate students in post-talks will attest to.

He and I began to collaborate on this project for the Stanford Design School magazine

...