All right. I'm going to take your mask off. I can't see. I'm going to take it off. Don't you worry.
How are you? I'm calling you from the bowels of the lab here.
The human brain is the most complex structure in the known universe and we are in the middle
of a scientific revolution to understand its inner workings. Join us for a conversation with
world-renowned neuroscientists as they visit Rochester. I am Dr. John Foxe, director of the
Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester and you are listening
to neuroscience perspectives. Tanya, thanks so much for joining us today in these strange times
where we can't be together. I've wanted to interview you for so long. Obviously you and
I know each other for many, many years now. In some ways you're an amazing American story.
You started out your life in Riga in Latvia and which stops in Poland and Denmark before your
career in the US. Would you tell us a little bit about that? How did you end up in America?
What drove you to these various places to get your training? I came to the States on a NATO
fellowship from Denmark for a year to the University of Maryland and it was also an accident.
In the old days we used to request reprints. I requested a reprint from
Bill Hodders who was a professor at the University of Maryland who worked on pigeons. This is at the
time I was studying memory and a little bit of vision but mostly memory in the pigeon as a
model system. I wrote to him just asking for reprints and he saw my name and then he looked at
Denmark because he's been to Copenhagen apparently some years before and then he said what are you
doing there? Why don't you come and work with me? So I said oh that sounds good. So I applied for a
fellowship, NATO fellowship, because that was one thing I could do. I was a graduate, well I was
kind of a graduate, postgraduate student in Copenhagen at the time. It was at the Copenhagen
University and I got it and I went. Antónia can we turn the clock even further back to your
childhood in Latvia and what took you from Latvia to Poland? I grew up, I was born in Latvia. I grew
up in, it was a Soviet Union at the time, so I was Russian speaking. They were both Latvian and
Russian speakers. Of course Latvia was dominated by the Russians and the Soviet Union at the time.
In the Soviet Union during Stalin times people who actually wanted to leave couldn't leave.
Almost like now, you know, we can't go anywhere, right? Yeah, yeah. What kind of saying? Anyway,
and my parents really wanted to leave the country and when Kruschev came to power he allowed a lot
of people who were stuck in the Soviet Union and my mother was from Poland. She could prove it.
They let us, it's called repatriation, they let us go to Poland. It was on the way to
Israel. That was the plan because Poland was a lot freer than the Soviet Union so we came to Poland.
You really wanted the details? Yeah, of course. I mean it's an amazing story and I mean so the
plan was to keep going to Israel but you stopped in Poland and stayed then. Well we were there
waiting for my brother who didn't leave with us and then he was a lot older than me. He was,
he just got married, he didn't want to leave. Another long story, he married the Russian girl
whose father was a real Soviet patriot who did not let her leave. Right. And you have to have a
permission even as an adult of your parents permission to go anywhere. So they stayed behind
and it took 10 years and eventually my brother joined us but it took 10 years of my mother crying
her eyes out and trying to get a visa for him. Eventually he made it but only after they told
him that he has to get a divorce. These stories are of high interest because in at this time in
history too and maybe we won't get too deep into politics with the sort of rise of autocracy again
people have forgotten what it was like. That's right. In fact the way people were able to live
in this country for so many years they've completely divorced from politics. Well my life
was never divorced from politics. It was always completely part of it. My parents could not talk
to me about anything political because I would go to school and I would tell people and then they
would get arrested. So I never knew anything what was going on and then eventually we did
come to Poland and it was communist of course but it was freer. Yeah. And I finished high school
in Poland and then I went to the university Warsaw University to study psychology and
it was my country. I always had no interest in going anywhere. How did Copenhagen come about?
Again politics right. So the Jews in Poland who were completely assimilated including me
suddenly became the fifth column. There was open anti-semitic campaign everywhere because there was
a lot of unrest and demonstrations because of what happened in Czechoslovakia. There was Prague
Spring and Dupchik came to power and the Poles well we at the time wanted to have democracy too.
That's just like in Czechoslovakia. It wasn't called Czech Republic at the time. But there
were demonstrations and everything was blamed on the Jews. This is typical. There was an announcement
a short announcement in the paper on the front page of the Rzice Warszaw, which is the Polish main
Polish newspaper that said all the Poles of Jewish origin who planned to leave the country
should apply before September 1st. After that the procedure will change. That's it.
So what do you think happened to the 15,000? Whatever remaining Jews there were and they were
all quite we were all quite assimilated and wasn't really even though it was written down
in your passport it said whether you're Jewish or whatever. We didn't want to go to Israel.
We knew we needed to leave and there were two countries in Europe that were accepting
Jewish refugees. It was Denmark and Sweden. Amazing. Yeah, my parents went to Sweden and
I went to them. And the reason for Sweden is because my brother was with them already by that
time. He just came and he didn't want to go to it talking about politics and how it controlled
him. He didn't want to go to a NATO country. Denmark was a NATO. Sweden was not right. That's
why they went to Sweden and I didn't want to go to Sweden. I wanted to be in Copenhagen because I
already had a colleague who I knew from Warsaw from the same institute who was already there.
He was even a well-known Basel Ganglia researcher who's gone now but he was there. So I said okay,
I know one person now so I went there. Fantastic. I mean really an amazing story.
And then I was at this institute of experimental biology. I was giving a clinical psychology degree
actually which I got master's in clinical and I also started doing research on the brain
and memory actually. So I was working in Konorski's lab and Konorski was in this was
my claim to fame. Konorski was a student of Pavlov's. That's pretty good. Yes very much.
I was doing a thesis at the time using a dog as an animal model just studying
short-term memory. I believe it was auditory short-term memory. So this is what my thesis was
but I wasn't trying to go anywhere and had to finish my thesis before September. Otherwise
they would throw me out of the university. I had to apply before September. So I did. Got a letter
from Konorski which I still have which is cool and applied to go to Denmark.
And I couldn't take my thesis with me or any documents. It had to go through the
Dutch embassy. It was weird. Complicated. You couldn't just take things with you.
And you had to get permission from all of the various government institutions to actually
leave. So everything I have all of the documents assigned by this the bureaucracies and I got on
the train. You know I think it's instructive to youngsters today what people had to do to be
successful in that time and somehow you by a hook-and-by-cook you ended up in western New York
at the University of Rochester which is where you spent the bulk of your career and I'm sitting
right now in the University of Rochester where my own lab is. And one comment I had was that
clinical psychology degree I can attest to the fact that it served you well over the intervening
years because what people who won't know necessarily but except those of us who've been here at Rochester
with you is that you're somebody we everybody went to with problems when they needed them solved
over the years and that you always were you know a really deeply compassionate person.
Which brings us to my next question because well I'm going to come back to your science but I'm
very interested in the fact that you have spent a long illustrious and very successful career
as a basic researcher but now you're down at the National Institute of Health taking the call to
public service. Here's a question is there something that you've learned since you went down
to NIH that that surprised you? I'm learning a tremendous amount about
the review process that we fight so much for right what it actually takes to give us
money. We're usually they're very often upset and unhappy and right about oh it's unfair.
It's extremely difficult to get right. So many exceptional people competing for
so few dollars it's bound to be difficult. Also the review process itself it's quite interesting
because people who run those SROs like me right now the scientific review officers
it's not their field most of the time. They don't know the field so they there's a lot of
information online. I can go and look you up and I can find out what your expertise is who is like
you so they would you could actually say somebody like John Fox you literally click and there's
some keywords that go with you the expertise, research interests, blah blah blah all of that
and then if if I cannot get you even though you would be the perfect reviewer for me
I can go through and find somebody who has similar expertise but this is how a lot of
SROs work. At the moment I'm very new I'm really lucky because I can pull names out of my head
which I do because I know the community it just happens and I was very lucky that they really
want me to work on Brain Initiative. Can you tell our audience a little bit just quick background
about the Brain Initiative they'll have certainly heard of it on the news but just quickly what it
means? Well it's really started in 2014 I think and and the funding came in and it's really quite
good and it's BRAIN stands for Brain Research Advances in Neurotechnology something like that
that's what makes it so it's all about developing the most advanced approaches to the global study
of the brain at different levels so there's a lot of push of developing new technology but that means
recording rather than from one neuron at a time recording from thousands of neurons at the time
data analysis all of that so there is a really good amount of money now to try to
change the way we approach systems neuroscience of course but at the same time there is a big push on
the new the networks of course we're studying it's all networks right? Right yeah and you have your
own efforts are have a concentration on on invasive brain mapping in humans right? What happens is
that some proposals came in and I was this is something I could do I mean I don't know I
haven't done any invasive brain work right of course in humans but I've been in monkeys forever
right? Yes yeah right so it was kind of natural for them and I know the field that so I got out
there were only I ended up with eight proposals to do they're big but there are just eight
right and so the focus of this particular program which is this invasive program is even
though it says clinical trial and only have you seen the RFA on this it says clinical trial but
anytime you have humans it's called clinical trial. Yes yeah. Focus is really on not on clinical
trial trying to come up with some ways of improving human condition yet you're trying to understand
the mechanisms it's very much close to what you are really interested in. You know one of the things
that can be difficult to explain to folks is why it's so important to do basic science I mean your
career was defined by doing fundamental basic science agnostic as to for example a disease
model or something you know something that you were trying to cure but and people would might say
well why are we spending money to do this when we should really be spending the money to do
disease? We are spending money to to deal with disease there is no way you could understand
the disease even if you don't understand the organization of the brain we know that that
uh let's say Parkinson's has major problems with frontal lobe among other things right and major
problems with the basal ganglia right so we are not going to understand and figure out what to do
with with that particular disease if you don't understand the connectivity and interactions
between those regions so having an opportunity to do it in humans is tricky right? Yeah absolutely
yeah absolutely at the same time it's very unique so there's some things you could not really do in
animals very easily well you can't do it at all if you study language that's what you do right among
other things can't you can't do this but you could you look at mechanisms of of language processing
in humans now how do you do that you can't make holes in humans heads just right but this is
opportunistic so you have patients with epilepsy mostly who are going to have surgery they are
already instrumented so there are already electrodes in their brain so the idea in this program is not
to add more electrodes because you really can't do this right to use what you have and try to come
up with clever behavioral tasks right where you could actually record already where you're in the
locations where these electrodes exist right you have to come up with really clever behavioral tasks
right to whatever question you're going to be addressing and of course appropriate recording
techniques and data analysis which is the key so the experimental design is as important in
human in these experiments if not more as it is this would be working with non-human primates or
mice yeah you're making two really really crucial points i love that you know the opportunistic
nature of it right we don't we don't do surgeries in humans so we can record their brains it's
because they've already had the surgeries and the other part is that you can't fix something that's
broken if you don't understand how it works in the first place and that's that's the the key to this
i wanted to get back to your own science i want to ask you really straightforward question you
you you spent a career studying the nature by which the brain represents information over time
this working so-called working memory could you give us a couple of big insights there things that
i have to move you back in my career because it is i mean my main focus has always been ever since
poland it was really relating brain and behavior it's really whether it happens to be working
memory tasks which are much more recent in my life except for the early stuff and pigeons but
generally right i'm really a vision scientist who was trying who has always been trying to understand
how sensory information or visual information is processed in the brain in cortex in particular
there is not a single task that you ever perform or your subject or yourself or anybody else it
it doesn't include if you do have any kind of sensory signal you will always have a mechanism
you will need a mechanism to retain it even very briefly particularly in working memory because
there's no no behavioral task it doesn't involve working memory does it just focus on it sounds
cooler working memory school right motion perception yeah it's good but it's basically
inseparable i believe so you just asked me about the working memory right it has a cool factor
that people like to pay attention to but i think it's separable from the rest of the work that
i've done actually in a cat for many many years really relating what specific regions in cat cortex
what is their it's role in being able to make a decision about visual stimuli it's a decision
making as well what a profound privilege it has been to work with you you and i only overlapped
here for for about five years you're so well known in our field you're a leading light in our field
and i can't think of a better person to be at program at the national institute of health
helping guide the future of vision science cognitive science you're you're a beacon to
to folks in the field i feel very privileged that i i mean it was sad for me to leave but i feel
privileged that i can actually make have an impact now maybe a little bit broader i do think that
that you know we started out with the what you had to do to get to where you are and the trajectory
in your life and in the in the struggles and the trials and tribulations comes fortitude and the
ability to stay focused and to stay at things and that's one of the hallmarks of the way in which
you've approached science over the years and i know i speak for the field that that we're thankful for
that