Madame Lasagna and the Dead Frog - A Novel of Life, Love and Neuroscience
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On a late afternoon in the fall of 1984 gunshots ring out at a crowded Harlem schoolyard in upper Manhattan. Seven-year-old Shiloh Johnson drops to the ground, blood seeping from a headwound. The narrative shifts to an academic seminar two years earlier, on the downtown campus of New York University. The speaker, Reese Knightly, a dynamic, highly regarded neuroscientist, and the subject of a recent New York Times profile, is lecturing about his research on learning and memory in rats. In the audience Roger Bansky, a newly minted PhD, who is currently teaching at NYU and will start his first position as a research neuroscientist in the fall, and Grace Pliset, a student in his class, listen attentively. Grace has studied ballet since she was four, but now at 26, after several knee injuries, is considering an alternate career. ......