An eye for science: Q&A with Bryan W. Jones

In 1989, long before he became a neuroscientist, Bryan W. Jones stopped by a thrift shop in Brooklyn and, on a whim, bought a used Leica M6 camera. The purchase changed his life.

In the next couple of years, dyslexia would derail his adolescent dream of becoming a pilot in the U.S. Marine Corps—something he says he wanted to pursue after seeing an AV-8B Harrier jet’s short takeoffs and near-vertical landings. But armed with his Leica, he developed a keen sense of photography, and he later parlayed his youthful interest in military technology into a part-time job as a photojournalist, documenting the voyages of nuclear submarines and drone operations.

At the time, he was also working as a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience—a field he fell in love with after considering medical school and working in a sleep lab. When he and his wife began thinking about having a family, traveling to war zones for work started to seem less appealing, he says. He turned to science full time.

But he never gave up his love of photography. Now Jones is associate professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences at the University of Utah, where he studies how the retina remodels itself during disease. There, too, he regularly takes portraits of other researchers—his way of documenting the people behind the science.

“At the time, it’s a snapshot. But in the context of history and time, it becomes more valuable,” he says.

Jones spoke with The Transmitter about what led him to retina research and what photography can reveal about both vision and the process of science.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Transmitter: Why the retina?

Bryan W. Jones: I was initially interested in epilepsy. For my graduate work, I wanted to look at the weighting of GABAergic versus glutamatergic inputs and recurrent feedback collaterals in the hippocampus. What I had read is that you should do the dissections on cold glass plates. And it turns out that that’s great for genetic assays and routine histology, but if you’re looking at cell metabolism, as I was, you have a problem—because the small molecule export pumps work just fine at low temperatures, but the reuptake pumps don’t. As a result, depending on how long the tissue was sitting on the cold glass plates, the cells were dialyzing at different rates. So my data was all over the map, and at the time, I didn’t understand why.

TT: What were you thinking? That it’s not working?

BWJ: It’s not working! So I was looking for another project. And one of my colleagues told me that the lab had some mouse models of retinal degeneration that had gotten older and hadn’t been used. I looked at the animals’ retinas, and lo and behold, it was the same thing that another colleague had seen in a set of human retinas: remodeling that was so extensive, they no longer looked like retinas; all lamination had been lost. So that became the basis for my Ph.D.

The retina, it turned out, was also this beautiful model system: this completely gorgeous, compact representation of dense neurological topology that defines all of the primitives for how we start processing vision. It just totally seduced me.

TT: What are you working on now?

BWJ: The first mission of the lab is to figure out the normal circuit topology of the retina, and then the next is to figure out how that topology breaks in diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa, age-related macular degeneration and glaucoma. We’ve been looking at how bad that wiring gets after the loss of photoreceptors.

And then more recently, we’ve been looking at the earliest stages of changes in this degeneration, and that has led to the idea of using the retina as a model for central nervous system neurodegeneration, such as Alzheimer’s disease. Because if we wait until very late in the course of retinal degeneration, we see the same proteinopathies that start to emerge in Alzheimer’s; we also see a lot of the same changes in protein expression.

There have been a few studies that have looked at gap junctional changes in Alzheimer’s, and that is also one of the earliest biomarkers that we see in retinal degeneration. So maybe we can start using the retinas as an earlier model for understanding how Alzheimer’s disease progresses, because right now there are no good early models.

TT: Does photography influence how you think about vision research?

BWJ: A lot of people think of eyes and retinas as cameras, and they’re not. They function very, very differently. There’s a lot more nuance to how they function, and there’s a time component to how they function. But photography is one of the easiest tools that we have to think about vision and communicate it. So at the same time, it’s a useful tool, but it’s also an imperfect tool to communicate vision. And I think about that a lot.

I also think about how much I value vision—how it shapes how I view the world and remember the world and sort of cogitate on the world. And so for me, photography is a constant reminder to me of why what we study is important.

TT: Why did you start taking portraits?

BWJ: A good friend of mine, David Hobby, was a photojournalist for The Baltimore Sun. David and I were doing a portfolio review: You select 5 or 10 of your photos and send them to each other, and then critique each other’s work. And he was looking through mine, and he said to me, “I don’t see any people.” And I said, “Well, yeah, people kind of scare me.” And he says, “That’s your next project.” So I thought about it, and we decided to do a project photographing scientists.

And so if I’m at a conference or getting coffee with someone or if somebody’s visiting my office, I’ll try to get a portrait. If it’s a good photograph, I’ll send it to them, and they get to use it for their own purposes, and it’s kind of fun. And you see how people change over time.

TT: It’s also a way of documenting the field.

BWJ: At a vision conference one year, I heard a talk on the history of the Association for Research and Ophthalmology. The speaker somehow got these old snapshots of some of the original “gods” of vision science—including Brian Boycott and John Dowling—and he was showing these pictures of them as young people, sitting on a bench talking. And you realize, “Oh! That’s the flow of information. That’s how this idea went to this person. And this person did a postdoc in that person’s lab. And it all makes sense.” But we don’t really talk about that much. And we don’t document it.

I didn’t realize until well into my postdoc how important the human aspect was: You’re going to review each other’s grants, and you’re going to send postdocs or graduate students to other people’s labs. It’s a long game, and you’re going to run into the same people again and again and again. And so, you know, if there’s any wondering, “How does science work?”—it’s people.

TT: What makes a great portrait?

BWJ: Not all portraits are equal. Sometimes the light is just so beautiful, and sometimes the same vibe isn’t there. Most of the time I’ll only make a portrait if there’s a comfortable, relaxed feeling. That doesn’t always happen. And sometimes, if the light isn’t bad, I’ll make a photo but nobody will ever see it, because it’s not a great portrait and I’m not going to do that to people.

So the secret is: It’s in the edit.