On inspiration

I write this article in the beautiful city of Vienna at the European Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology meeting 2014. This is a meeting that happens every two years and I have been to every single one since the inaugural meeting in 2006 in Prague. As a card-carrying evolutionary developmental biologist, I began my career working on the basal chordate amphioxus. For the last five years or so have been working on questions of brain evo-devo in amniotes, predominantly using chick as a model system, in a neuroscience department. As such, I am thoroughly embedded amongst people whose primary concern is frequently how things work rather than how they have evolved. Often, the notion that biological systems have evolved seems (or perhaps, feels) completely alien. Philosophically, the approach frequently is intensely reductionist and shares more common ground with that of engineers than with many areas of biology. If there is a strain of criticism in my voice, it is only subliminal – working in a neuroscience department has been intensely invigorating and stimulating for my own scientific development.

Nevertheless, it is wonderful to be at a conference surrounded by people who are interested only tangentially in ‘cool’ experimental approaches, but primarily in really interesting animals and plants and what they can tell us about biology. It is the problems that count here, not the approaches – they are just a means to an end, though ironically the field has proved much quicker than most at adapting to new technologies (sequencing is an obvious example). As such, having initially thought that I would try and put together a meeting review, I have decided not too. This is not for the want of great talks, though I have drank a lot of beer in the last few days and have been rather worse for wear during many of them (another reason EED is a great conference). The reason for my change is that I wanted to write about something a bit less obvious: inspiration.

As a first year PhD student I bumbled along to a mini-meeting in Oxford on evo-devo in the UK. I was all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and loving the start of becoming an evolutionary developmental biologist. The crippling self-doubt and crushing disappointment and delusion that would come to characterise much of the rest of my doctoral studies had yet to set in. This is not a complaint – I had a successful time with very good supervision during my PhD; it strikes me that a PhD is supposed to resemble emotional purgatory (at least, always seems to – people who say it doesn’t, or more often reminisce that it didn’t, are lying).

Anyway, that’s not important. What I wanted to talk about was the inspiration that got me through, and it was to at least some extent the result of that meeting in my first year. I heard, amongst other people, Cassandra Extavour present some really preliminary data from her postdoc in Michael Akam’s lab in Cambridge. She works on germ cell specification in arthropods. I have no idea how that works (I didn’t then; I still don’t now). The data she presented was not at the time particularly impressive (though that is likely at best an uneducated opinion, dragged up from the back of my bad memory). But you could see the spark. She was fantastically bright and depressingly charismatic.

Well, eight years later, she is now an Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. She has published about 4347238472 nice papers across a range of big and small journals (one of the things that in my experience seems to characterise good scientists is the willingness to publish in smaller journals rather than just shoe-horn data together and bully editors over the phone at NPG or Cell Press) and is, in short, a massive success. At EED 2014, she gave an update on her efforts as part of the community setting up a Pan-American evo-devo society that will be the sister to the European one of which I am a member. She also went on to highlight how the American network, through loudly and accurately advocating the field and jumping through the appropriate hoops, are in the process of convincing the National Science Foundation that the field of evo-devo can directly contribute to the goals of the NSF. Compared to the frequent tendency (at least in me) to naval-gaze and complain that people don’t fund evolution for its own sake, this was incredibly impressive*. I hate writing pieces that if I read them would make me post an anonymous comment of ‘vomit’, but I have made an exception as I stand to gain nothing: it was an inspiration.

*To be fair though, it does help to have a funding body that ask scientists (the people who actually have an informed opinion) what the priorities should be, rather than dictating to them what they are, and then asking them to change their behaviour. The ERC has developed a stellar reputation for exactly that reason too – the only criterion is scientific excellence; there is not a ‘strategic priority’ in sight. Research Councils UK take note. Please.

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