Yale Neurobiologists Find That Life Revolves Around Their Profession

NEW HAVEN, Conn.--Patricia Goldman-Rakic, sitting in her office at Yale University, is talking to a visitor about the problems and pleasures of being married to another scientist when her department chairman knocks on her door and enters. He explains that he's normally more polite but that, since she is his wife, he takes certain liberties. They smile, then he gets down to the business at hand--copy for an advertisement for a new journal, Cerebral Cortex, of which they are coeditors. She skims the copy, corrects his spelling, and nods her approval. He departs, apologizing for the interruption. As he leaves, she offers an explanation for why, despite feeling that their professional responsibilities are stealing time away from their marriage, they agreed to take on this new publication, which debuts early next year. "Right now, to follow this field [the study of the cerebral cortex], you have to read 25 journals and you pick up one [article] here and there," she says. "There's a field, but it's fragmented. This will help coalesce things." The project, and their interaction, typify how these two neurobiologists live their lives. Because they are peers with similar goals, they are often willing to put science first in order to make the greatest possible impact on their field. Life for this two-scientist couple is the story of two researchers who play leading roles in their discipline. The 53-year-old Goldman-Rakic has just completed a term as president of the 18,000-member Society for Neuroscience. And in April she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Her husband is 57-year-old Pasko Rakic (pronounced ra-KEESH). Head of the neuroanatomy department at the Yale University School of Medicine, he was elected to the academy in 1985 and since then has added the neuroscience society's prestigious Grass Foundation Award to a long list of honors. As a youth in Yugoslavia, Pasko Rakic fancied himself an architect. But his parents convinced him to study medicine, pointing out that doctors were the only professionals who enjoyed relative autonomy in that communist state. He picked neurosurgery as his specialty, thinking erroneously he'd learn much about the brain. "I was disappointed," he recalls. "It was more about opening the skull than anything about the brain. That showed me how little was known about the brain." In 1962, a Harvard neurosurgeon who was visiting Yugoslavia offered to bring the budding surgeon to the United States for a temporary job. Once there, Rakic says he fell in love with research. Although he returned home and taught for a few more years, he was allowed to emigrate in 1969 to become first an assistant professor, then an associate professor, at Harvard Medical School. His first grant application to the National Institutes of Health shocked his reviewers by proposing to do experiments in primates that previously had been attempted only in mice. Five scientists from an NIH study section quizzed him about the procedure before recommending approval. "I really was thankful to the system," he recalls. "I was obviously a foreigner; yet they trusted me. They gave me the money." As a result of the experiments, Rakic was one of the first scientists to recognize the importance of cell adhesion and cell-surface interactions in nerve cell growth and migration. He discovered that nerve cell connections between the eyes and brain, for example, are diffuse at first and become more specific over time. His work led him to an interest in the cerebral cortex. It also brought him together with Patricia Goldman, then a neurobiologist at the National Institute of Mental Health. "I visited the lab with the explicit goal to find out what he knew about brain development in fetal primates," Goldman-Rakic recalls about her 1970 visit to Harvard. They met again, casually, at scientific gatherings. "But it was not until much later," she says, "that we found we had interests beyond science, on a personal level." From 1974 until 1977 they dated via the Boston-Washington shuttle, she adds, spending weekends together and "a lot of money on telephone bills." In 1977, Yale offered to make Rakic head of a new neuroanatomy department. And, unlike the situation nearly 40 years ago with the Goldhabers (see page 7), Yale had no problems making room on the faculty for Goldman. So the two packed their bags and headed for New Haven. Although the move was a step up in her career and offered her opportunities to expand the molecular and cellular aspects of her research, Goldman-Rakic felt it was a precarious one. "It was a new environment with a new set of parameters and a new set of unknowns for me, including grants, graduate training, and medical student teaching," she recalls. Working for the government, she says, "I really didn't have to deal with that before." At Yale they work on different aspects of the cortex. Rakic concentrates on how the cortex develops before birth and on its cellular and structural components. Goldman-Rakic focuses on how the cortex functions in the growing and adult animal. She was one of the first neurobiologists to look into the role of the brain's frontal lobes, an area that's now a flourishing subdiscipline of its own. The husband and wife share a colony of primates that are used in their work, and at times they have sponsored the same postdoctoral researchers and have been coauthors on a few articles and chapters. Together they worked out a prenatal surgery technique that enables scientists to study primate brains during development. But they say that the differences in their work outweigh the similarities. "Mostly our research is separate," says Goldman-Rakic. "We were different, and we have maintained that complementarity. If anything, we've accentuated it. It's important to have one's own identity." Both of them agree that keeping one's own identity has helped their marriage be a happy one. "To some extent we have an easier time because we were already both formed scientists," says Rakic. Goldman-Rakic concurs. "There's no sense of rivalry because we understand quite well the nature of science," she explains. "We have our distinct goals." But having such a close colleague as a marital partner has its drawbacks. "As chairman, I can promote others in the department easier than I can promote her," says Rakic. And Goldman-Rakic thinks she may sometimes be treated differently from other faculty if she is seen as an extension of her husband. She also worries that his presence could cause her own administrative and leadership skills to be overlooked. A partner in great demand also can be hard on a marriage. Each is likely to be gone about one week a month, he to conferences as an invited speaker and she, this year at least, to Washington to fulfill her duties as president of the neuroscience society. Luckily, adds Rakic, sometimes they find themselves traveling to the same meeting. Still, Rakic and Goldman-Rakic believe that there is much to be gained from having a marriage of equal scientific partners. "I have a double joy when we discover something," says Rakic. Adds Goldman-Rakic, "We've had an enriching effect on each other. We've learned to accept criticism and not to take it very personally." Being on the same wavelength also allows them to feel each other's frustrations and glories. It is not unusual, as grant deadlines approach, to find them side-by-side at their computers at night, both writing proposals. "We understand each other's time constraints," says Rakic. "I am not jealous of her time. I can see why that [what she has to do] is important." The same collaborative spirit extends to household chores, again marking a difference from an earlier era. "Whoever has time available does what has to be done," says Goldman-Rakic. "We fill in for each other at a moment's notice." But all is not perfect, they confess. "The truth is, our life is not very balanced," says Goldman-Rakic. "It revolves a great deal around our work. And we do feel overwhelmed by it from time to time." Month-long vacations, a common occurrence during the early years of their marriage, have been whittled to a week at most. Even so, Goldman-Rakic says that the trade-offs have been worth it. "I don't think either of us feels that there's too much [science] in our lives." --E.P.

Yale Neurobiologists Find That Life Revolves Around Their Profession

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of