Postdoc update: Finding beauty in the (very) little things

With the click of a button today, I submitted my final funding application for the fall 2015 season. It's been a rude, if unsurprising, wake-up call to what it means to be a postdoc-- so many long hours staring at screens, reworking paragraphs, and looking for just the right turn of phrase that might convince someone that my science is just the thing that will lead to that next great break-through, all the while wondering if that's even close to the truth.

I'd love to be able to share more about my project, but my hands are tied. Such is the depressing reality of science these days: it's all so cut-throat that nothing can really be shared before it's all wrapped neatly in a bow and published. Broadly, I am looking to better understand how the circuits develop in the eye (the retina) that allow us to detect motion. We've got some genes that we're particularly interested in, and some implications for better understanding the visual disease called nystagmus. I'm also working to develop tools that fall under the broad category of "optogenetics," a hot new field in science in which we design genetic systems which allow us to use light to control, manipulate, and record from neurons.

What I'm lacking in specifics, I thought I'd make up for in a little art gallery of recent scientific images. The first two are from a series I affectionately call my Starry Night collection.

Starry Night 1/2

Starry Night 2/2

These images are taken from plates of cultured cells growing densely together. I was shocked to find such beauty pop up under the microscope!

This next image is more meaningful. I call it Visualizing Vision. This is a highly magnified image of a cultured mouse retina, which closely resembles that of a human. In it, you can see a whole lot of blue amacrine cells, little intermediate cells in the chain of retinal information flow, which begins with the light-sensitive photoreceptors and goes all the way down to the ganglion cells, which form the optic nerve that sends preliminarily processed visual information along to the brain, in the form of a handful of parallel channels that each carry different aspects of the visual scene. In pink, you can see two ganglion cells, both reaching out to the hole in the top left, from which the optic nerve used to exit the retina and travel to the mouse's brain. In those pink cells, we can see axons extending toward the brain, stretching their fingers in an easily visualized goal of passing along the message as it is begins its transformation from little photons of light into that complex sensation we know as vision.

Visualizing Vision

I might be a burned-out researcher, and a postdoc filled with doubts about my future. And yet, sometimes I see images that really make me pause in amazement. I might read a thousand different charts and diagrams and textbook explanations of how the retina works, but there's just nothing quite like holding one in my hands, placing it under a microscope, and seeing its beautiful functional design first hand, knowing that I am looking at the very system that allows me to look, to perceive the visual world. I hope I was able to transmit a little bit of that wonder to you today.