Kenny Jackson
Ideas: Singing in the Dish
dr. kelley jumps to conclusions
PrintThe frog room smells just like a marsh. The space is closet-sized and shelves along the walls are stacked with clear plastic boxes, each filled with water and housing a couple of bored-looking frogs. But as soon as Dr. Darcy Kelley lifts the wire lid off one of the tubs and reaches for a frog, it explodes into action, squirming and kicking with its webbed feet. This is Xenopus: a surprisingly homely-looking aquatic frog from sub-Saharan Africa. His simple song is the subject of Columbia neuroscientist Kelley’s research on vocal communication.
Xenopus is petite, with tiny claws on its webbed toes and eyes that look straight up from the top of its head. You could hold one in the palm of your hand, if you managed to catch it. Males and females look identical, save for one distinguishing characteristic: males have dark patches on their forearms that act like Velcro, enabling them to hold on to females when they clasp, or mate. “She’s very slippery, you know,” says Kelley.
The frog vocal system, though different from ours, works through the same basic physical elements and processes. Their brains interpret sound input, develop a response, and realize it through a vibrating vocal organ called the larynx. Xenopus sings a song made up of quick clicks, like the sound of a Geiger counter or a matchbox car wound too tight. However, their songs are not “musical” in the usual sense. Frogs sing based on instinct alone; they don’t have to learn their songs and they aren’t thinking creatively. Their communication is simple, consistent, and tractable- perfect for scientific research. In fact, Xenopus has only four songs in total: two for the males and two for the females, and only two intentions: either attract mates or scare off competition. “So the thing to do,” says Kelley, “is to take this very simple system, which is simply shut-up or be turned on, and ask how it works.”
Still, in Kelley’s lab, simplification can go one step further. “It turns out,” she says with a wry smile, “that you can make the brain sing in the dish.” By dousing a disembodied brain with neurotransmitters and electricity, it is possible to trigger a frog’s vocal organ to sing by itself, without the rest of the body. Though it seems a bit gruesome, this technique is valuable because it allows Kelley’s team to gather more accurate data about how communication works in the brain. Having accomplished this feat, the next step for Kelley’s lab is to see if they can get the isolated brain to hear, allowing the lab to explore the relationship between hearing and utterance in the brain with unprecedented accuracy and control.
Although Kelley’s research is relevant in numerous fields, including developmental biology, vocal communication, and genetics, her goal is more personal and simple: to pursue her passion and curiosity. “Often in science,” she says, “incredibly important insights into biology come not from whatever clinical problem you think you’re studying, but from somebody who’s, you know, fascinated by spiders.” She works to find answers to questions that intrigue her and, when it comes to applications for her research, she isn’t worried. “I’m perfectly sure that everything I find out about the frogs is going to cure stuttering, but it’s not my job in life to cure stuttering; my job is to find out how it works.”
Kelley’s passion for science is clear; but her high-school teachers had different ideas about her future. “They always thought I was too emotional and literary to be a scientist,” she says. For Kelley, science is full of fascinating stories and beautiful ideas, and she suggests that her teachers’ skepticism “reflects an inaccurate view of what science is.” Kelley laments the public’s general apathy toward science and the fatalistic attitude of “so-called non-science students” who think science is frightening, or worse: boring. As a self-described literary person, she feels that, “students who are in the humanities and know no science shut themselves off in an extraordinary way from a whole source of metaphors they could have for looking at the world.”
This concern for science’s image incited Kelley to spearhead Frontiers of Science: Columbia’s core science class and the scourge of freshman year for many prospective English majors. Frontiers was designed to address what many professors saw as a neglected aspect of modern education: scientific habits of mind. Thinking critically, analyzing problems, and interpreting data are invaluable skills that apply directly to all areas of study. “We see over and over again,” she says, “not just in our students but in our government leaders and in our citizens, a complete misapprehension of how you would gather data and make some sense of it, how you make an informed decision.”
Kelley feels that Frontiers benefits faculty just as much as students, if not more. “When you become a scientist,” she says, “gradually your training becomes more and more narrow…one of the good things about Frontiers is that it promotes interaction among the science faculty in a very real and powerful way.” Frontiers allows faculty to take a broader perspective and share ideas with people in entirely different areas of research.
Kelley is aware that Frontiers is not everyone’s favorite, but rest assured it won’t be going away anytime soon. “If we’re going to have a core curriculum, if we’re going to decide that there’s stuff that everybody should know, I would argue that scientific habits of mind are right up there.” After all, you can’t get out of Music Hum just because you’re tone-deaf, and science should be no different.
Back in the lab, Kelley has exciting plans for research this summer, mapping and manipulating how Xenopus communicates. First, they will study which parts of the brain control which aspect of song production and comprehension. Then, they plan to play around with the brain circuitry: deactivating different components to see how it alters communication between frogs. The results look promising, she says, “but there’s nothing I can talk about yet.” Like any good story, science still has its secrets.
30 April 2009
vol. 6, issue 12
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