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Lessons from the Lobster Eve Marder’s Work in Neuroscience
Charlotte Nassim
The MIT Press, 2018
ISBN: 978-0262037785 |
The author has declared this book as a “thought biography”, which focuses on the evolution of ideas that has defined the career of Eve Marder, a preeminent systems neuroscientist. In particular, she is noted for pioneering our understanding of how simple, invertebrate neuronal circuits are modulated and how they can consistently produce the same outputs in unpredictable and ever-changing environments. Moreover, she also discovered that these circuits can produce similar outputs despite having great variability in both their electrical properties and their gene expression patterns. In other words, having multiple solutions to the same problem is not only possible, but the norm. This not only helps explain why these circuits are so robust in unpredictable environments, but also why they have endured natural selection’s relentless pressure. Very provocative ideas indeed!
As a non-traditional biography, the reader will not find a chronological timeline of Marder’s life history, which might not be to everyone’s liking. Personally, I think there is much to learn from understanding where a person comes from and how their life history made them who they are, but I nevertheless found this “thought biography” quite enlightening and enjoyable to read. Without all the confounds of her personal life, we get a clear view of how Marder became the scientist she is and how her research evolved over the decades. Making our journey more vibrant is the abundance of precise examples from Marder’s research. You will find diagrams, figures and graphs throughout (all clearly referenced) that are well explained but without miring us in the minutia. As such, there is much to learn here and much to get inspired by. Additionally, we know that we are getting an accurate view or Marder’s mind as she closely collaborated with her biographer and personally vetted this work.
