Yosif (Joe) Zaki

Project 1: Theoretically speaking…

ENGW3307
Spring 2018
Dr. Cecelia Musselman

I started taking photos when I was 15. When I picked up a professional camera for the
first time, I was allured by the dozens of buttons and switches that adorned it, each with its own
discrete function. I thought, how could photography—a practice often described as “creative” or
“artistic”—be so calculated and technical? I had always had a stronger affinity for the sciences
than I had for the arts, but there I stood, holding a contraption that straddled the two worlds—
two worlds that, up until that point, I thought were non-overlapping.
I came to college to study neuroscience—a seemingly purely technical field. When I
conjured up an image of a scientist, I would picture someone who followed rigid protocols and
had clear views of the future of science; I would never have used the word “creative” to describe
science.
Early on in my undergraduate career, I was taught about Santiago Ramon y Cajal, a
neuroanatomist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on elucidating the structure of the nervous
system. It turns out that when he was young, he was deeply interested in art, but he chose to go
to medical school where his father was a lecturer. There, he drew the structures that he observed
under a microscope in meticulous detail, and these drawings became the first evidences of
today’s canonical view of nervous system structure—that is, that neurons are discrete units that
are interconnected through tiny spaces between them that we now call synaptic clefts1. This guy
seemed like an artist to me. He was drawing the world around him as he observed it.
When I joined my first laboratory during my second year of college, the precise and
calculated nature that I had always envisioned of science quickly manifested itself around me.
People were running around wearing lab coats and driven faces, following printed protocols, and
following strict schedules. I would have never confused science for an art form. And one day, I
noticed a book in the lab titled, “Advice for a Young Investigator,” and a coworker suggested that
I read it2. I was, in fact, the youngest investigator in the lab.
I went home and carefully deciphered the lessons that the author claimed would lead to a
successful career in science. There were discussions on being independent as a thinker and
excerpts on being suspicious of already published science. The book read almost like a protocol,
and described very objectively how a successful career in science could be attained. A scientist
must have written this book, right? But when I flipped to the front of the book, I saw “Santiago
Ramon y Cajal” written in big letters on the cover. The same person who I thought of as an artist
was also this calculated and technically-driven character. Maybe the worlds of science and art
interacted more than I had originally imagined.
A few months into working in that lab, I was tasked with learning how to use a
fluorescent microscope, which was an expensive piece of equipment that was used to visualize
samples of brain tissue. Sitting down at the microscope for the first time felt a lot like the first
time I held a professional camera. I found that a microscope was simply a machine much like a
camera is, allowing the viewer to observe the world in a different way than their eyes normally
could. And after observing many cellular structures under that microscope over those months and
for years since, I no longer think of science and art as two disparate schools of thought. In fact, I
now ascribe a lot of my creative thinking to my scientific endeavors.
 I think most—if not all—scientists would agree that there is more scientific literature
than anyone can reasonably parse through in their lives. Moreover, there is research being
published every day, which means that if someone thinks that they have caught up with the
literature, surely more research has been made accessible by then.
When I began reading scientific literature, I was severely overwhelmed by the jargon.
And on top of the jargon, papers demanded that the reader understood the methods thoroughly,
could decipher the purpose of the experiments and their results, and most importantly, could
tease out how the results fit into the scientific narrative that scientists were trying to construct
around that phenomenon.
The approach I adopted to learn to read papers was to assume truth in everything I read.
After all, I was so accustomed to memorizing ideas straight out of the textbooks from years of
schooling. And I was unfamiliar with being critical of scientific writing; I had never been taught
how to be.
In several courses, I was taught that when someone stores something in long-term
memory, there are changes in protein synthesis in their brains that reflect this learning; in other
words, long-term memory is dependent on protein synthesis. That makes sense: there must be
changes in the brain that accommodate learning episodes, and it turns out one of those changes is
protein synthesis. This was an idea that was made famous by Eric Kandel, a neuroscientist who
studied learning and memory in sea slugs. In fact, this idea was so ground-breaking at the time
that Kandel won the Nobel Prize for it in 2000 for it3. And since then, this concept has been
reaffirmed in many ways. For example, if a protein synthesis inhibitor is injected into the brain
during a learning task, long-term memory is impaired4.
In 2015, however, a paper was published challenging the notion that long-term memory
was entirely dictated by protein synthesis. They used a protein synthesis inhibitor to block long-
term memory in a mouse during a learning episode, but concurrently labeled the cells that were
thought to store the memory of the experience. Days later, when they placed the mouse back in
the environment, it showed a deficit in recalling the experience, as was expected. But when they
activated the labeled cells (which comprised the memory), they showed that they could rescue
the expression of the memory5. This indicated that protein synthesis may have been important for
the expression of the memory, but not necessarily for storing the memory in the first place. It
wasn’t that Kandel’s idea of protein synthesis being involved in learning was wrong, but this was
an instance of a phenomenon being more nuanced than was originally thought and generally
accepted.
This was the first of many formative experiences of this sort, and it has shaped my
approach to reading literature. Of course, the research we read is important and informative, but
it is rarely the end of the story. Perhaps this concept will be revisited in 10 years (as was the case
here), or in 100 years. What we know now is only what has been tested, and there will always be
more to test. As Cajal describes, “the infinite is always before us6.”
Works Cited

1. Santiago Ramón y Cajal – Biographical. (n.d.). Retrieved January 18, 2018, from
https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1906/cajal-bio.html
2. Cajal, S.R. (2004). Advice for a young investigator. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
3. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2000. (n.d.). Retrieved January 18, 2018,
from https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2000/
4. Meiri, N., & Rosenblum, K. (1998). Lateral ventricle injection of the protein synthesis
inhibitor anisomycin impairs long-term memory in a spatial memory task. Brain
Research, 789(1), 48-55. doi:10.1016/s0006-8993(97)01528-x
5. Ryan, TJ, Roy DS, Pignatelli M, Arons A, Tonegawa S. (2015). Engram cells retain
memory under retrograde amnesia. Science, 348(6238), 1007-13. Doi:
10.1126/science.aaa5542
6. Santiago Ramón y Cajal's Advice for a Young Investigator. (2016, October 13).
Retrieved January 18, 2018, from
http://www.dana.org/Cerebrum/2016/Santiago_Ram%C3%B3n_y_Cajal%E2%80%99s
Advice_for_a_Young_Investigator/