Male and female brains, Proust, and Catherine Dulac

Catherine Dulac is the Samuel W. Morris University Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard. In her episode of “Synaptic,” Dulac recalls gathering bones from caves as a little girl in France and discusses her work beyond examining parenting in mice.

Read the transcript. A sample is included below.

Brady Huggett
You’re doing often behavior work. It looks like behavior work, but you’re coming at it from a biological standpoint. I think that’s a little uncommon and that might give you some uncommon insights. Do you think that that’s true at all?

Catherine Dulac
It’s true in multiple ways. Thanks for asking the question. One of them is that it’s true that behavior has traditionally been looked at from two completely different angles. The one from psychology that is interested in behavior in trying to get insight into animal behavior, to get insight into animal behavior. The other one from ethology, which is just to try to understand the rules of animal behavior. I come from a standpoint of a biologist using biological tools that enable to gain insight into mechanism, cellular mechanism, molecular mechanism, trying to find causality in behavior in ways that is never achieved or even sought after, neither by ethologists, neither from psychologists.

The other point you’re making is that basically I come to the field of behavior as an outsider, which I think is super important. In fact, it even is a guiding principle of my own lab, which is people who come from my lab all come as outsiders of the field of social behavior. There are people who have worked on copper metabolism, or in immunology, or in C. elegans motor behavior, people from my lab all come from very different horizons, and they come as outsiders and because of this, they ask tough questions.

Brady Huggett
You’re choosing that.

Catherine Dulac
All right. This is on purpose.

Brady Huggett
Specifically, I want people like that.

Catherine Dulac
Exactly.

Brady Huggett
Yes. Do you think that’s why your lab is so productive?

Catherine Dulac
I don’t know if it’s the reason my lab is productive. I think I have very good people, but at least that’s the type of environment I want to have. I want an environment where people are challenging ideas, including my own ideas. I think that’s enabled us to make a lot of progress.