The stainless-steel refrigerator has a piece of paper taped to its door with the words "No Food or Drink" handwritten across it. After all, this isn't the kitchen of any galloping or frugal gourmet but the laboratory of the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience. But when neuroscientist Leah Krubitzer opens the door, the insides look very much like any common kitchen repository--shelves filled with various-sized Tupperware containers, as if there were lots of leftovers from a previous evening's dinner party.
Krubitzer removes one of the containers. "See," she says, "lots of complex folds," referring to the dolphin's brain visible through the transparent sides of the container. She then pulls out a smaller container, this one holding the brain of a marsupial.
"See how much simpler this one is? So how did we get from here," she asks, pointing to the marsupial brain, "to there?" meaning the dolphin brain. "That's my question."
It is this question that has propelled Krubitzer's lifework for nearly a decade and a half--work that has now earned this 37-year-old neuroscientist one of this year's MacArthur Fellowships, popularly known as a "genius grant." She was honored for her leading-edge research into the evolution and development of mammalian brains. A significant component of Krubitzer's "genius" is her ability to conceive original questions that range across any number of highly specialized fields, from neurobiology to evolutionary theory--and to devise experiments that yield interesting results.
During the course of an interview in June--just a week after she received word of the award--she takes great pains to distance herself from identification as a genius. "From the little I've read, the award is about people who are working on the fringe of their field," she explains. "Their experiments or work is tangent to the common theme of research in their area; they are doing experiments that are perhaps a little risky, not likely to get funded by typical funding institutions. It's not about being a genius. It's really about being stupid."
Not for the last time does one of Leah Krubitzer's disquisitions on a topic result in laughter. Indeed, her elaboration is prototypical of her particular variety of genius: the precise definition of terms, followed by a counterintuitive insight, punctuated with a vernacular expression of the result. Scientific inquiry guided by a creative logic ultimately expressed in language of comic shtick. Krubitzer may work in the ivory tower, but she remains aware and amused that its foundations rest on dirt.
Not that her point is not serious. Quite the opposite. She goes to great lengths to attribute her award to the teachers and colleagues with whom she has carried out her research. "You know, you don't do science in isolation. Everyone says, 'Leah, you're wonderful, you're wonderful.' And I want to say, 'I'm not.' I don't want to say I'm a fraud. But I didn't just pop out of the blue and say, 'Hey, I've got a good idea.' There's a huge foundation for my work. It's not even just my current laboratory team, which is tremendous. But it's also the team that came before me. And those who strut around as if they're 'the man' are fools, you know?"
Beyond her obviously heartfelt gratitude and appreciation for co-workers past and present, Krubitzer also wants to dislodge any romanticized notion of scientific labors associated with the notion of "genius." "The laboratory is exciting for me. But it's also filled with everyday crap, where you're on the microscope for eight hours, you've got a headache, sometimes experiments don't work. . . . It's filled with all this stuff and 98 percent of it is not glamorous at all.
"You have to have an average intelligence. But you also have to have tenacity, the right sort of something that pulls you through. It's not about IQ. That's a teeny-weeny-beeny part of it. I consider most people at the center to be smarter than I am. I'm not saying that just to be modest. I would like to think I'm an equally good scientist, but being smart and being a good scientist are two different things."
Asked what the difference is, she hesitates. "I don't know. It's hard to describe. I mean, it's just about working hard and not giving up and plodding through in the face of adversity. Besides the tenacity, it's somehow being able to ask interesting questions. I think I have some of that stuff, and I ask good questions."
Certainly others, including the MacArthur Foundation, believe Leah Krubitzer asks very interesting questions, including her most fundamental question. As she describes it, "I love this idea of evolution, and I'm really interested in how you build a complex brain. That's my question. How do you build a brain? How do you build a human brain from relatively simple parts?"
To answer this question, Krubitzer has spent most of her adult life investigating the structure and organization of brains across the mammalian kingdom, from rodents to duck-billed platypuses, from the smallest neuronal connections to the most complex resultant behavioral capacities. The conclusions that she has drawn from her studies are both obvious and startling, as they are composed of the most commonsensical observation of the similarities between animals and humans and simultaneously challenge the more high-vaunted views of the "superiority" of the human species and its supposed unbounded potential.
What has brought Leah Krubitzer to these conclusions and her current work has been an interesting and even unexpected journey from the town of Wilkes-Barre, Penn., where she grew up. Attending Catholic schools through high school, she was always a bit rebellious. But it was not until she attended Penn State--"because I liked their football team and the tuition was low"--that she first began to seriously question her world view. "I had some wonderful, unbelievably smart nuns as high-school teachers. But, I tell you, when I first read about Darwin and really started to understand these things in college, I felt that I had been misled my entire life. That I had been robbed and cheated. Not just about Darwin, but about everything."
The Penn State library and the diverse college student body were revelations for Krubitzer. "College wasn't about formal courses for me. It was about finally interacting with people from different parts of the country and state. Being exposed to Nietzsche, Darwin, reading books I had never been exposed to before. A lot of it was classic science. . . . [I began] to think about the world very differently.
"When I first started, I thought I knew a lot. But education is a continuing process of realizing how little you know about anything. And the more I learned, the more I realized I don't know anything. Sometimes it still paralyzes me. And I don't want to write a paper or do anything. I think to myself, I have no right to be writing about these things. At Penn State, that was the first step, saying, 'Leah, you know nothing. The only difference now is that you know you know nothing.'"
Graduating from college with a major in speech pathology, Krubitzer quickly realized that her energies and curiosity could not be contained in the role of speech therapist. "I realized in my senior year that I did not want to be a speech pathologist. It just wasn't for me. You need a fair amount of patience to help people and rehabilitate people, and I just didn't have it. So, I thought, what should I do now?"
What she did was obtain a full scholarship in audiology at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. After six months, "I realized this isn't really for me. It's not fun." Then came that random event that changed her life. "I'd always been interested in the brain. And someone said, 'There's this guy who lets people come into his laboratory to work on the brain. Maybe you should go talk to him.' His name was John Kaas. Six months later, I transferred over and was doing a Ph.D. in physiological psychology with him.
"I had little formal training in neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, evolution. As a matter of fact, I have almost none in any of those fields. So it's interesting that I'm an evolutionary neurobiologist with a MacArthur award. A lot of what I know is self-taught from just reading books and being trained by a wonderful neuroanatomist."
One of the few times when Krubitzer becomes almost reverential is when she speaks of her mentor, John Kaas. She even says that this MacArthur award really belongs to him.
From her first days in his laboratory, she knew that she had found something that fully engaged all of her energies and curiosity.
"I didn't have a clue what they were doing in the laboratory really. But people were doing electrophysiological recordings and listening to neurons! It was this world I had no part of but had suspected existed for a long time. And I was thrilled, absolutely thrilled. I just knew I wanted to be a part of this, part of the science of studying the brain, being among people who have conversations about the brain. I wanted to be part of that environment because it's a wonderful environment."
In describing her reaction, Krubitzer seems as excited as if her discovery had just occurred. Asked to elaborate on what's "wonderful" about the field she has since devoted her life's work to, she describes the feeling produced by the work as well as its content. "It's seldom that people who are high up in their field are also so amazingly generous with their thoughts and ideas, and get excited about listening to a neuron response. They have a passion about something that maybe the rest of the world doesn't care about.
"I'm still excited when I walk into a laboratory. I can't tell you how many hundreds of experiments I've done. But every time I hear neurons fire, it's as if it's the first time it's ever happened. I'm an electrophysiological virgin, you know? Like, 'whoa, this is good.'"
