Among the many secrets buried deep within the human brain is the cause of epilepsy. Epilepsy is a disorder marked by sudden releases of electrical energy by the brain. The victim suffers a seizure which may involve twitching muscles, confusion, and loss of consciousness.

In ancient times, epilepsy was considered to be a curse of the gods. The Greek physician Hippocrates knew better.

"It seems to me," he wrote 2,500 years ago, "that the disease is no more divine than any other. Men think it is divine merely because they don't understand it."

Sadly for epileptics, Hippocrates' wisdom was buried with him. For the next two thousand years, some of the greatest medical minds of the time would look to the divine for treatment of epileptics. The treatments sometimes involved teas made of poisonous mistletoe or blood sucked from the mouth of dying gladiators. Sometimes, epileptics were simply burned at the stake for being sorcerers or witches.

Ignorance of epilepsy could be expected from people who understood so little about the human brain. For 2,000 years, most scholars agreed that the heart was the body's main organ, the center of human thought, emotion, and mental well-being. It wasn't until the 1600s, that some researchers began to understand the central role of the brain.

William Harvey, the British scientist who discovered how blood circulates in the body, proclaimed, "the brain is deemed the prince of all parts."

An Italian scientist, Luigi Galvani, provided fascinating evidence of Harvey's statement. Stories were told of the luxurious dinner parties thrown by his wife. After dinner, Galvani would entertain the guests with his latest experiments, such as making a dead frog's leg twitch by stimulating the frog's brain with electricity.

For every appetite lost at a Galvani dinner party, a curious mind was stirred, and in time, a new field of study developed---neuroscience.

In April, an international team of researchers hopes to expand the frontiers of neuroscience. Although no one is looking for divine explanations, the laboratory will be located in the heavens...on board the space shuttle Columbia. This week, What's In The News takes a look at NASA's Neurolab and explains how students can become part of the mission to understand the "Prince of Parts."