Ruminations of a dog scientist on a 96-well plate

I've been doing a lot of bench work in the laboratory lately. This involves filling the tiny little wells on a plate with my ingredients (sample, reagents, primers) and then inserting the plate into a reader. The machine takes the plate up with whirring sounds that always fascinate me. I know there are little robot arms in there moving the plate into place, and I wish I could watch the process. But as I listen to the robot work, I sometimes think: is this the closest I get to living, moving animals now? How did I get here, so separated from fur and behaviors and emotions?

96 well PCR plate

My long term research goal is to understand the differences in how brains work in dogs who suffer from fear issues compared to resilient dogs who take life's arrows a bit more in stride. I'm doing this by studying gene expression in the brains of foxes who have been bred to be fearless (“tame”) or fearful (and aggressive — those who study them just refer to this line as “aggressive,” though).

My approach is, at the moment at least, deeply reductionist: what are the differences in gene expression in a few brain regions in these two lines of foxes? In other words, does one group make more of a certain kind of gene than the other? My hope is that I’ll be able to make some conclusions about the differences in function in these brain regions between the two lines of foxes, and that what I find will be relevant to fearful dogs. But I find myself burrowing deeper and deeper into learning about very small parts of the brain, and then very specific functions of those parts to the exclusion of other parts. Currently I’m learning about the pituitary gland — no, wait, just a particular cell type in the pituitary gland, the corticotroph — no, wait, just a particular set of processes of the corticotroph, how it releases one particular hormone into the bloodstream.

So in my daily work, I do things like take some tissue and extract all the RNA from it (throwing out DNA, proteins, cell structure, all sorts of interesting information — that's not what I'm working on or able to assess at the moment). I use PCR to extract a tiny piece of RNA from the complete transcriptome (all the RNA from that tissue), throwing out even more information. And then assess the expression level of that RNA, resulting in just one number. One number out of all that information after a day’s work.

Behavior can’t really be fully understood using this reductionist approach. If I do find a few important gene expression differences in a few small brain regions, they won’t explain the whole story of why an animal has a fearful personality. They’ll be a tiny, tiny piece of a complicated network of interactions involving genetics and life experience. But in order to get at that tapestry we have to first be able to visualize the threads that make it up. So here I am, in the trenches, doing that.

A recovering shy dog.

The point of all this

I was on the phone with my mom yesterday, and she asked what I was doing next week. “Going to a large shelter in [big Southern city,]” I say.

“I’m not sure what the point of all this is,” says my mom with her PhD, who had been so enthusiastic when I told her that I was planning to do a PhD in the genetics of dog behavior after I finished my internship. “But you have known what you’re doing before, so I guess you do this time too.”

“Do you want me to try to explain it?” I ask, and she allows that this would be acceptable.

So I try to explain why I’m doing a year of clinical work in shelters if I am so interested in dog brains. The thing is that I have always been interested in both research (and teaching and writing peer-reviewed papers and being hidden in the ivory tower) and in being in a shelter or in the field and getting my hands dirty and making a tangible difference. I do want to figure out the mechanisms behind pathological fearfulness in dogs, and what makes domesticated animals like dogs different from wild animals like wolves. But I also want to keep connected to the world of the animals who are actually suffering from shyness, both so I can get new ideas about what needs studied, and so that I can try to apply some of what I learn.

I have always felt that my two interests, in fearfulness in dogs and in clinical shelter behavior, are closely intertwined. But the institutions I’ve learned from don’t seem to see it that way. Four years of clinical work for a DVM degree (in which we were told again and again that more veterinarians are needed in research, but in which we had no classes about research topics). One year of a research Masters. One year of a clinical internship. Next, several more years of research. My internship mentors worry that I am too interested in research and not enough in clinical work. My PhD mentor worries that I am too interested in clinical work and not enough in research. When do I get to do both at once?

After I’m done with schooling, maybe. I’ve learned a lot about how shelters work in my internship, and maybe even more importantly, I’ve seen some possible career paths in consulting for me. Part time work, called in on a temporary basis to work for large animal welfare groups dealing with issues such as enrichment in temporary shelters after large seizures of hundreds of animals, or behavioral evaluations of large numbers of seized fighting dogs. The other parts of my time spent teaching? Doing some research? It’s way too soon to try to figure out the details, but at least I have ideas of where to look to put together my perfect patchwork of jobs. And hopefully with my internship under my belt I will have the street cred to say that I know how shelters work and what their common problems are.

Maybe I should have just said that there are lots of broken dog brains in shelters, and left it at that!

Where I'm coming from

In his keynote address to the second UK Conference of Science Journalists, Jay Rosen wrote, “I think every writer, every journalist, every scholar, should tell you where he’s coming from before he tells you what he knows.” And proceeded to do so.

Culturally, I’m a New Englander. I grew up all over the country, but felt the most at home in New England and moved back there as soon as I was an adult. Of course, I am currently an expat living in the South. Demographically, I am the child of baby boomers. Socially, I can’t say it any better than Jay did: I’m an introvert who has learned to fake conviviality. Politically, I am a social liberal and a fiscal conservative, sometimes libertarianish. Musically, I am a child of the 80s. Intellectually, I am a learner and a doer. I really like learning for learning’s sake, but I am obsessed with starting new projects to change the world (and not always finishing them).

To Jay’s list, I’ll add this: professionally, I am a veterinarian; however, I suspect that after my internship I won’t be a practicing one, but one who teaches and researches and makes herself a pest about public policy. I believe we should treat our pets with as much respect as we treat each other; that our food animals should have room to walk around, and that we should be aware of where our food comes from and make thoughtful choices; and that there is a lot more going on in the brains of animals than a lot of people think, but less than some other people think.

So, other bloggers out there: what about you?