Cool talk alert: Why some of us are fat and what we can do about it

It’s not every day you can step into a lecture on the biological basis of obesity, but Downtown Brooklyn’s Genspace does such a good job that it’s not that big of a surprise that you can this Thursday.
The community laboratory space brings Dr. Barry Levin, a professor and researcher in neurology at Rutgers Medical School. The talk is called The Obesity Epidemic: Why Some of Us Are Fat and What We Can Do About It. In the talk Levin will address questions like:

• Is obesity due to food addiction?
• Is obesity inherited and how do early life events alter any inherited tendency to become obese?
• What is the relationship among food intake, expenditure of calories and storage of excess calories as fat?

Levin is just a few years removed from his most recent solo work, the thrilling, Ventromedial hypothalamic glucokinase is an important mediator of the counterregulatory response to insulin-induced hypoglycemia, but going back to the mid-1960s, his ouevre contains more than 200 works.
This talk comes at what seems to be a particularly exciting time in science. The study of gut bacteria and the human microbiome continues, revealing the extent to which we still don’t understand some of the very basic functions that take place in the body. A story from February of a thin mother who took a fecal transplant from her obese daughter and promptly gained 30 pounds exemplifies that. A terrific article from last year in The New Yorker about a scientist working in a field he basically created, optogenetics, shows the degree to which we’re still very much only starting to understand the workings of the brain, or even how to study it!
Which is all to say that our bodies are complicated systems, more complicated than we even know. So obesity is likely also more complicated than just calories in and calories out. If you’re interested, this seems like a great opportunity to get some knowledge up in your domepiece.
http://www.meetup.com/Brooklyn-Biohackers/events/230297242/?rv=me1&_af=event&_af_eid=230297242&https=off