By Emily Crosby, Superfund intern and senior at Duke
Somewhere in the fairly distant future, I’m hoping to be a developmental pediatrician. So why did I choose to spend my summer studying behavioral toxicology with zebrafish in the Levin Lab? Because it’s absolutely relevant. Here’s an example. My hometown of 10,000 people has four industrial mills, a history of waste disposal noncompliance, and an unusually large special needs program in the public school system. Coincidence? Probably not. But somehow, the connection between toxin exposure during development and brain function later in life has been kept quiet. None of the townspeople really know what’s going on, and there is no drive to figure out what these toxins could be doing to the local population.
Analyzing behavior is the first step in identifying potential neurotoxins. Our job in the Neural and Behavioral Toxicity Assessment (NBTA) Core is to see if there is a phenotypic change in behavior associated with exposure to a drug. Yes? Let’s figure out what it is. Bring in the reinforcements – the Superfund Research Center has toxicologists, analytical chemists, and molecular biologists to figure out what exactly is going on physiologically, what the consequences are, and how we can fix it. No significant behavioral effects? Then let’s move on – there are only thousands of other chemicals that still need testing.
This interdisciplinary nature of our research means that I’ve had exposure to a variety of fields and academic environments. Chemists work with psychologists and engineers, undergraduates collaborate with postdocs, and lines blur between the School of Medicine and the School of the Environment. As a lab, we went to Grand Rounds in the psychiatry department at Duke Med to hear about recent findings on the neural effects of nicotine. We ran behavioral tests described in an earlier post, not only on our own flame retardant exposure subjects but also on fish from other labs across Duke and North Carolina Central University. We helped out with rat experiments on the nature of nicotine addiction and raised a zebrafish colony.
And they’ve got me hooked – I’ll be coming back in the fall to complete my honors thesis through an independent study in pharmacology. In a world full of unknown carcinogens and neurotoxins, an understanding of toxicology is increasingly important in medicine. And what can be a more important research background for a physician, as a consumer of drug research and novel treatments, than pharmacology?
Thanks to the Superfund Research Center for an incredible, integrative experience in undergraduate research. I’m thrilled to have been a part of the summer program, and I can’t wait to see where the next year takes me.
