John E. Dowling
Gordon and Llura Gund Professor of Neurosciences Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology Harvard University© TOM KLEINDINST/MBLAs a high school student in Providence, Rhode Island, John Dowling was not a good student. “I was doing too many other things, like playing sports, starting a school newspaper, and being a class officer,” he says. In tenth grade, he contracted polio and spent months recuperating. Not wanting him to lose the entire school year, his mother requested that Dowling’s teachers prepare lessons for him to do at home. “All of my teachers enthusiastically prepared the lessons except for my biology teacher, who wrote my mother that I was so hopeless in biology that I should drop the course.” Dowling gladly complied.
Dowling reconsidered his relationship with the subject during his undergraduate days at Harvard University, where he studied how vitamin A deficiency influences vision. He has conducted vision research ever since, working on the functional organization of the retina, studying its synaptic connections, teasing out how the neurons of the retina respond to light, investigating how retinal neurons communicate information, and using a zebrafish model to study the development and genetics of vision.
Here, Dowling discusses how he helped revamp the biology curriculum at Harvard, pursued a PhD without knowing it, fished for laboratory supplies, and how, at age 79, he’s finally going to do a postdoctoral fellowship.
Falling in love with biology. Dowling majored in biology at Harvard and planned to attend medical school. During ...
