David Sandeman PhD

The neat thing about animals is that they do stuff. Unlike plants, rooted to their source of nourishment, animals move around. They run, fight, look for food, recognize each other, bond, build nests, houses, reproduce, knit. And they do all this because they have a nervous system. Myriads of single cells that together receive information from the outside world communicate with one another and issue commands to an elaborate system of muscles that are ingeniously fitted to an articulated frame. The emergent result of this combination is that animals move through their worlds with a grace and facility that cannot cease to intrigue any who watch.

Behavior then, is what the nervous system is all about; what it does. I have been privileged in being able, through luck and some application, to spend the greater part of my life watching animals, playing with them, taking them to pieces to see how they work, and trying to understand something about the nervous system that is the centerpiece of all they do. I started early, perhaps when I was given a small book by Henri Fabre on insects and a magnifying glass. Fascinated by the almost frighteningly beautiful precision of the structure of insects and crustaceans, I have never left them as an object of my attention. Along the way I have learned a lot about them, even discovered a few things about them that were not generally known. But the real excitement is to have been around to witness how the view of the animal kingdom has so changed over the decades. I have always been struck by how very similar were the “solutions” that the arthropods and vertebrates “found” to the problems of detecting the outside world, integrating the signals in the central nervous system, organizing the motor commands and the final execution of these to produce behavior. Of course we now all (well, nearly all) accept the evidence from genomics that tells us how very close we animals really are to one another and that the study of any animal group, no matter how lowly they may seem, can be useful in constructing an overview of how animal nervous systems work.

At 70 years of age I suppose that I have to accept that actuarial tables do mean something and that I am in the afternoon of my life. Nevertheless the fascination with living things has never been stronger. At Wellesley College, and as the Co-Principal Investigator with Barbara Beltz on a study of the modulation of adult neurogenesis in the crustacean brain, I have been granted yet another lease on my scientific life. I will continue and attempt to understand another intriguing aspect of the nervous system: No, it is not true that our brains start to atrophy at the age of 18 years and that from there on it is all downhill, not true at all. Nor is this true for many, many animals. Our brains respond to use in the same way that most organs in our bodies do. With proper use, they do not wear out, they get stronger. One of the most recent and exciting areas of modern neuroscience, the understanding of adult neurogenesis, offers an alternative to senility. The answer is to stay challenged, keep thinking, and keep working. And that is what I intend to do, and what I do at Wellesley College.