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Meet the Community: John Dowling
Interview by Charlie Schmidt
Q: How have your research interests evolved over the years? A: I was always interested in science and how things work. At first, I thought I’d become a physician and that’s how I started at Harvard, as a premed biology student. But in my junior year, I took a biochemistry course with George Wald and became enthralled with the subject. What I remember most was his description of Albert Szent-Gyorgyi’s experiments with muscle fibers, in which you extract a piece of muscle from a rabbit or frog with glycerin and then add ATP to make the fibers contract. I thought that was incredible—that you could replicate what the living animal does in the lab. So, I asked Wald if I could work with him during the summer and my senior year, and that’s how my research career began. I did go off to the Harvard Medical School and spent two years there. I then took a leave of absence and I’ve been on that leave ever since! I first earned a Ph.D. and then stayed with Wald for three years helping him teach his famous course, “The Nature of Living Things.” From there I went to Johns Hopkins and returned here as a full professor in 1971. With Wald, I worked on visual pigments, and a project involved with vitamin A deficiency, which led me into issues such as retinal degeneration and the nature of signaling by photoreceptors. After I received my degree I became interested in how the visual message is dealt with by second- and third-order cells in the retina. The point is that the retina is far more than an array of photoreceptors: indeed two stages of visual processing occur already in the eye. So, it became clear that the retina could be used as a model piece of the brain to work out brain mechanisms, and that’s been the main focus of my research ever since. Most recently, we’ve become interested in retinal development and genetics, working with zebrafish, which are a model organism with many advantages: you can do forward genetics with zebrafish; that is, you can mutagenize them and look for alterations in eye development or visual behavior. As I’ve gone from one thing to another, I’ve continued to be interested in earlier projects, such as photoreceptor mechanisms and how they adapt to light, or retinoic acid, which I worked with as a graduate student. Our lab has recently been particularly interested in the role of retinoic acid in retinal development, so, everything comes around as they say. Q: Are there any achievements that you’re especially proud of? A: I’ll tell you a story: Back in the 1980s, when I was an associate dean, I was chatting with a colleague who said, “Whenever I talk to a scientist, regardless of age, they tell me the work they’re doing now is the most important they have ever done.” “Now that can’t be true.” I replied, “You are right, of course,” my colleague said, “but you never know when you are actually doing a particular experiment how important it will turn out to be.” So, going way back, I never knew retinoic acid would become such an important molecule in developmental biology, even though we said in our first paper that it could be a critical molecule for development. When I became curious about how retinas are wired up, and looked at them using electron microscopy, I realized we could recognize specific synapses this way. This gave us a way to work out the wiring of the retina that has been the gold standard ever since. There’s also our work with zebrafish over the last decade and our finding that there are differences in development between the dorsal and ventral retina. This was the first realization these parts of the retina are developmentally and functionally distinct. Q: You’re well known at MCB for your teaching in addition to your research. How do you compare these two endeavors? A: I’d say my teaching has been much broader than my research. I’ve been teaching introductory neuroscience here for over 30 years, starting in 1972 with the first neurobiology course offered by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The course was designed for sophomores and eventually I wrote up the lectures and turned them into a book called Neurons and Network, which has now gone on to a second edition. I broadened the course content as the Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative evolved to encompass computer scientists, philosophers, and others who are interested in the nervous system but have little background in biology. I also wrote a trade book called Creating Mind: How the Brain Works, which has done reasonably well, as well as a book on our research entitled The Retina: An Approachable Part of the Brain. In my introductory neuroscience course, I start out talking about cellular and molecular neuroscience. I then turn to systems neuroscience—how aggregates of neurons interact together to underlie behavior—and finally I discuss cognitive neuroscience and its integration with psychology. Q: What aspects of neuroscience would you advise a young researcher to focus on today? A: I think we’ll see the most exciting progress at the interfaces of neurobiology, cognitive neuroscience, and ethology. That’s why I’m so delighted with the new Institute for Systems Neuroscience, which the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) is establishing. It will bring together people from MCB and Organismal and Evolutionary Biology (OEB), psychology, computer science, and applied science in a way that I think is very promising. Q: What do you see yourself doing in the future?
Q: Anything else you’d like to say? A: Let me speak a bit further about the Min/Brain/Behavior Initiative (MBB), which I think is a terrific addition to the Harvard undergraduate experience. (Dowling is the cochair of the standing committee of this program.) The intent of MBB is to examine the impact of neuroscience on other academic disciplines, such as medicine, law, government, business, divinity—you name it—and the influence of these fields on neuroscience. Seven concentrations including biological anthropology, biology, computer science, history of science, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology now have MBB tracks so there is enormous interest among the undergraduates in the brain and the brain sciences. Q: What has motivated you in your research? A: I’d have to say curiosity—how things work, how they function, that’s the bottom line. It has to be that: curiosity about how things work.
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