As a very busy FHL summer wraps up, it’s fun to read this essay about one research scientist’s many summers at FHL, from lab neurobiologist staying in “primitive” huts, to Whiteley scholar housed in those elegant cabins.  We hope some readers may be inspired to come experience the Whiteley Center atmosphere themselves, as it’s a place where scholarly productivity goes on in the midst of beauty and diverse intellectual activity.  We usually have space available (except in the summer) even for short-notice visits, and we love to have the Center be an active hive of scholarship!

22 Summers at Friday Harbor Labs

by William N. Frost, PhD

Professor and Chair of Cell Biology and Anatomy, Chicago Medical School, & Director of the Stanson Toshok Center for Brain Function and Repair, Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science.

My first visit to Friday Harbor Labs was in the summer of 1986.  I was a new post-doc with Peter Getting, who had himself trained with Dennis Willows, the long-time director of FHL.  As I packed the University of Iowa van for the 2000-mile drive, Peter told me almost nothing about where I was headed.  What an experience to take that ferry past all of those islands to Friday Harbor, and then drive through the forest to the end of the road at the Labs!  As if getting there wasn’t enough, when we walked through the main lab building for the first time and out onto its upper deck, we were greeted by a bright double rainbow over that beautiful harbor!  I was perfectly happy to be assigned one of the original small, unheated huts, 2 or 3 of which are still in use today as storage sheds near the maintenance building (Figure 1).

A day or so after helping Peter set up our electrophysiology rig in Lab 2, we were off on the research vessel Nugget to Bellingham Bay where several trawl runs pulled up two dozen of what we were after: the large pink nudibranch Tritonia diomedea.  It was always fun having people drop by Lab 2 to see the amazing escape swim Tritonia generates when touched by one of its natural predators, the seastar Pycnopodia helianthoides (Figure 2).  Thirty-seven years later I still work year-round on the neural circuitry mediating this animal’s rhythmic escape behavior in my lab at Rosalind Franklin University, using Tritonia overnighted to us by SCUBA-diving collectors in Canada.

What is it about this hard-to-obtain marine mollusk that holds my interest after all these years?  For a neurophysiologist, Tritonia offers one of the better understood neural networks in the animal kingdom, with many neurons individually re-identifiable in the living brain across every specimen.  What’s more, the number of neurons is small enough that several have been shown to play causal roles in the animal’s behavior.  The neuron DRI, for example, is one of the best examples in any animal of a single command neuron controlling a complex behavior.  Driving DRI activates the entire, prolonged swim motor program, and preventing it from firing prevents sensory input from eliciting the motor program.  While one might question whether investing so much responsibility in a single neuron is in the animal’s best interest, it’s a huge advantage for the experimentalist trying to understand the neural basis of behavior.  I still remember the exciting evening at FHL during the time when we knew DRI existed but didn’t know where it was in the brain (and thus couldn’t study it).  That night I was lucky enough to find it with a dye-filled electrode, and then hurried over to the main lab to use a fluorescence microscope to see and photograph this below-the-surface neuron for the first time, filling a long-missing crucial link in our understanding of this neural circuit.  Other findings came in later summers, including demonstration that Tritonia shows two forms of learning, and is capable of forming long-term memories.  At the Labs we also collected key data on the cellular mechanism mediating prepulse inhibition, a sensory gating phenomenon that normally helps to reduce distractedness but goes awry in schizophrenia, and made our first observations that led to a paper on drug-induced hallucinations in an invertebrate.  Our current endeavor is using Tritonia to investigate the neural mechanisms of network focusing – in which it reorganizes which neurons participate in the swim motor program to optimize network function, something we suspect may be universal to healthy brain function in all animals.

One summer at FHL someone showed me the fascinating swimming sea anemone Stomphia, which is native to the waters around San Juan Island.  When it detects the leather seastar Dermasterias imbricata, Stomphia astounds first-time observers by doing something very un-anemone-like: it detaches from the substrate and swims away to safety.  In my own studies we have found Stomphia to be surprisingly smart.  For example, it can distinguish Dermasterias from another predator, the small nudibranch Aeolidia papillosa.  In response to Dermasterias, Stomphia immediately flees, but in response to Aeolidia, Stomphia starts with a stinging attack; if this proves unsuccessful, Stomphia then changes strategy and launches its escape swim (Figure 3).  As a neurobiologist, what makes this so fascinating is that Stomphia does all of this stimulus-discrimination, decision-making and strategy-switching with no brain!  Like all anemones, its nervous system consists only of a diffusely organized nerve net.  How it does this is a great mystery that my lab is just beginning to unpack.

In 2000 FHL opened the beautiful Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center, a special space with elegantly-appointed studios for creative and scholarly work (Figure 4, left), together with lovely nearby cabins for accommodations (Figure 4, right).  Like so many others who have worked at the Whiteley Center, I’ve discovered it to be a perfect place to get away from the busy academic routine and immerse myself in writing projects — in my case involving the research I’ve done and continue to do at FHL.  A particular pleasure is the contact I’ve had with other Whiteley Fellows, whose passions span an enormous variety of scholarly and artistic work.  This summer our cohort included scientists, writers, poets and a musician, working on projects ranging from the cultural origins of voodoo to the creation of an opera libretto inspired by whale songs.

One of the few pleasures of growing older is the irresistible opportunity to tell younger colleagues about the “good old days.”  When I started college we were still using slide rules to solve our math problems.  When I first came to the Labs in 1986, several cabins were still wood heated, and the “bunny lawn” was actually well-populated by wild rabbits.  That first summer at FHL our lab had an amazing IBM-XT computer that took just 3 hours to run a neural network simulation.  A very few years later that same simulation ran in newer PCs in just a few seconds!  While I often maintain that great science depends as much on ingenuity and creativity as it does on fancy technology, a high point this summer was working with Karly Cohen in Adam Summers’ lab to use high-resolution CT scanning to reveal the internal 3D structure of Stomphia.  It’s amazing to be able to sit at the computer and digitally dissect the intact animal, examining its internal anatomy in vivid detail.  These images were exactly what I needed for a paper I’m planning on the structure of Stomphia’s nerve net, which may just require another writing visit to the wonderful setting of the Whiteley Center at Friday Harbor Labs.

The Whiteley Center often has space available for visiting scholars, alone or in small groups, from October through May.  Click here for more info and to apply.

References:

Brown G., Frost W.N., and P.A. Getting.  1996.  Habituation and iterative potentiation of multiple components of the Tritonia swim response.  Behav. Neurosci.: 110, 478-485.

Frost W.N., Brandon C.L., and C. Van Zyl.  2006.  Long term habituation in the marine mollusc Tritonia diomedea.  Biological Bulletin: 210, 230-237.

Frost W.N., Tian L.-M., Hoppe T.A., Mongeluzi D.L., and J. Wang.  2003.  A cellular mechanism for prepulse inhibition.  Neuron: 40, 991-1001.

Frost W.N., Brandon C.L., and D.L. Mongeluzi.  1998.  Sensitization of the Tritonia escape swim.  Neurobiol. of Learning and Memory: 69, 126-135.

Frost W.N. and P.S. Katz.  1996.  Single neuron control over a complex motor program.  Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.: 93, 422-426.

Lee A.H., Brandon C.L., Wang J.W. and W.N. Frost.  2018.  An argument for amphetamine-induced hallucinations in an invertebrate.  Frontiers in Physiology: Invertebrate Physiology.  Research Topic issue: Invertebrate Models of Natural and Drug-Sensitive Reward.  doi: 10.3389/fphys.2018.00730.