Scientist Spotlight: Art Edison
By Amy Mast
Art Edison
studies the world's
most-studied worm. C. elegans, a
type of worm called a nematode,
is such a well-mapped little creature that
scientists know the number of cells in its
body: 959 in a mature animal. Nematodes
are everywhere – in the dirt, in saltwater,
in Arctic ice, in plants, animals, and the
bodies of one out of every four people on
earth. Four out of five living creatures on
the planet are nematodes. To the layperson,
they're simple, generic, wormlike animals
we don't think about much. To a biologist,
they're fascinating, astonishingly diverse,
and, as Edison puts it, "the most successful
animal on earth."
Art Edison didn't start out as a scientist.
Edison's group is interested in the
chemicals c. elegans use to communicate
with one another and with their environment, specifically in the context of
development and reproduction. Research
magnets help his team understand precisely the chemical compounds that c. elegans
produce and respond to.
Q: You're examining a very well studied animal model. What's beneficial
about going down what's in some ways
a well-traveled research road?
If you want to learn about something
new – and my group studies chemical
communication – it's really helpful to start
from a known quantity. In c. elegans, the
fate of every single cell has been mapped
out from fertilization to the adult animal.
Next to maybe the double helix, that mapping is one of the significant achievements
in biology in the last century. Through that,
not only did we learn more about the development of a relatively complex multicellular animal, but also fundamental, widely
applicable things like programmed cell
death (apoptosis) in that study. Eventually
scientists realized that cell death was an important part of development, and that when
that goes wrong, it's important in cancer.
C. elegans are some remarkably adaptable animals; they can sense and respond
to their environment with an astonishing
level of sophistication. If there's abundant
food available, they develop in about three
and a half days; they go through their larval
stages, they become adults and they reproduce. They live for another week. In the absence of food, in harsh conditions, or when
they become too populous, they can sense
the population and the amount of food.
They can then choose an alternate pathway
where they can live for months, and survive
with no food at all. Both their behavior and
their anatomy change accordingly. As soon
as they're put in the presence of bacteria,
they go on developing and become reproducing adults. It's really neat. It's been
known for about 25 years that a chemical
caused that, but it was only more recently identified in detail. That chemical, and another that
controls mating behavior, have been really interesting
places to explore.
For me, I like to stay just at the side of an exciting field, and play with the things nobody's picking
out yet and see how they work. Folks in my field
are starting to look much more at interactions with
bacteria and pathogens. There's just this incredibly
complex world of below-the-ground worms interacting with bacteria and fungi, and some of the bacteria
are trying to kill the worms, and worms are trying
to eat other bacteria and they're all interacting with
plants and plant roots and larval insects. It's incredibly complicated stuff.
Q: How does one become a biochemist doing
"incredibly complicated stuff?"
Honestly, I didn't think that I liked science, and
growing up I had only the vaguest idea as to what
a lab environment could be. What I liked in high
school was ice hockey – and girls. I wasn't a good
student, and I had no motivation to do anything too
interesting academically. Afterward, I took a year off
and I did a lot of fun things. I was a river-runner, I
rode my bike across the country, and I did a bunch
of odd jobs. Then I went to a school called St. John's
College (in Santa Fe, New Mexico) where you just
start by reading Euclid and Plato and Aristotle and
reading ancient Greek. I liked it, but nothing was really grabbing me yet. I didn't know what I was doing
there, so I decided to take another year off.
During that year, I became a shoe repairman,
because I used to repair my ice hockey pads – I
had been a goalie – and I loved repairing leather. I
loved repairing shoes, and I could have stayed doing
it except I guess I just realized I should go back to
school. My girlfriend, who became my wife – we
moved down to New Mexico so that I could go back
to St. John's for another year, but I got especially distracted because I went to work in this boot-making
shop, and I made some boots, and then I discovered
that there was a saddlemaker who took apprentices.
And I thought: Why am I even thinking about school
when there's this guy who could teach me about
saddles? I quit school again and we built a cabin in
the woods with no water or electricity. And then I
learned how to make saddles, and I actually got a
job working at a saddle shop for three or four years.
Then I ended up being a ranch manager, and we had
a house with water and electricity – so my job was
to take care of things, but then the main part was to
fence 200 acres. I built some fencing, and it was one
of the hardest jobs I've ever done. I dragged railroad
ties with my horse, and it was really a pretty big job
in some rocky and steep country. During this whole
time I was a volunteer firefighter, partly just to have
the radio. Once I started doing it, I really liked the
emergency medicine aspect of it though, and I became an EMT, which I thought was really fun. Then
our first daughter was born, and I think for the first
time I really asked myself if I wanted to be working
on a ranch for the rest of my life.
I quit the job at the ranch and became an art
major at the university of Utah, with the idea of also
taking a bunch of science classes and then going to
med school. We'd grown up in Salt Lake City and we
wanted to be close to family. I chose art because of
saddlemaking and frankly, I didn't think I could deal
with science. I took all the science classes I'd need
for the medical part and kind of packed them together while I was taking drawing and painting. I found
two professors at the University of Utah, chemistry
professors, whom I just fell in love with: Dave Grant,
who turns out to be one of the great NMR scientists
in the world and Bill Epstein, who did natural products chemical communication in plants. I traveled
to Southern Utah with Epstein to collect chemicals,
and then we analyzed them with Grant and I realized: This is so much fun. I just hadn't realized that
that kind of job was out there, and you could do this.
I went through sort of a difficult six months figuring
out what I wanted to do. I was taking chemistry, and
I was drawing (gestures to a drawing of graphene's
structure on the wall) and that turned out to be kind
of the transitional piece where I realized that I was
thinking about science even as I was thinking about
art. So I realized I wanted to go into science and do
some artistic things on the side, and I got very straight
and narrow, finished up, went to grad school, got a
postdoc and got a job. It's been a really fun job, too.
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