This week, we present four of our favorite stories of all time.
Part 1: Neuroscientist David Carmel tests his own understanding of the brain when his own father suffers a stroke.
David Carmel grew up reading Oliver Sacks and loving the weird stories of what goes wrong in people's brains, so he became a neuroscientist. He spends his days trying to figure out how the brain creates consciousness, and his nights trying to remember why he ever thought he could accomplish this. He is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology at Victoria University of Wellington.
Part 2: Ralph Bouquet goes off script during a psychology research study with uncomfortable and revealing consequences.
Ralph Bouquet is the Director of Education and Outreach for NOVA, the PBS science documentary series produced by WGBH in Boston. At NOVA, Ralph’s team supports science educators through the creation of free classroom resources and finds creative ways to engage new audiences for NOVA’s broadcast and digital productions through science communication events around the country. Before NOVA, Ralph taught high school biology and chemistry in Philadelphia and then spent some time in ed-tech at a Boston-based startup. Ralph received his B.A. from Harvard University, and studied secondary science methods and urban education while completing his M.Ed. at UPenn.
Part 3: Feeling isolated in her new job as a particle accelerator operator at Fermilab, Cindy Joe finds comfort in the friendship of her unconventional pet.
Cindy Joe is an engineering physicist at Fermilab, America’s particle physics and accelerator laboratory. She got her bachelor’s degree in physics and became a licensed senior nuclear reactor operator at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. After starting at Fermilab, she worked as a particle accelerator operator for seven years before taking her current role with several experiments studying neutrinos, tiny particles that might hold the answers to some of the universe’s biggest mysteries. Cindy is a frequent and deeply passionate contributor to Fermilab’s educational outreach programs and has spoken to audiences from elementary school students to members of Congress.
Part 4: To discover why some survivors of trauma experience PTSD and some don't, scientist Rachel Yehuda must convince a community of Holocaust survivors to let her study them.
Rachel Yehuda is a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Director of the Mental Health Patient Care Center at the James J. Peters Bronx Veterans Affairs hospital. Her research on PTSD has included both human populations and animal models, neuroendocrinology, neuronal stimulations studies with human stem cells, and genomic and molecular biological studies of trauma. She has recently established a Center for Psychedelic Psychotherapy and Trauma at Mount Sinai.
Episode Transcript
Part 1: David Carmel
I knew what I wanted to do with my life the moment Captain Kirk turned to Mr. Spock and said, “Spock, you're the science officer, figure it out.” I was six, and this was the first episode of Star Trek I'd ever seen. Spock and Kirk were stuck in some kind of time loop which had transported them from the 21st century to the early 20th century, where they were imprisoned before long, by Nazis. Sure enough, Spock rigged something up and set them free, and something in me just clicked. I wasn't quite sure what it was yet, so I went and asked the ultimate authority on all things – my dad – what a scientist was exactly. And he said, and I remember this because he used almost exactly the same words as Kirk, he said, “Scientists are people who try to figure out how the universe works.” And I thought, “yes! That's what I want to be.” Of course, at the time this was intertwined with being an astronaut and fighting Nazis, and I could live with that. Spock became my hero. I didn't care for Captain Kirk's success with the ladies. I wanted Spock's analytical skills. That particular set of priorities has changed a little since then.
It wasn't until several years later that I figured out specifically which strange new worlds I'd be seeking out. When I was 18, I came across the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks. The book recounts Sax's experiences as a neurologist, treating people with strange and bizarre conditions, usually but not always following a stroke that had deprived part of their brain from oxygen. So there was the story of a man whose eyesight was fine but who could not identify faces, sometimes mistaking them for different objects like hats; and there was this other guy who didn't believe his arm was his own, even though he could clearly see it was attached to his own body.
David Carmel re-shares his story originally published in March 2011 at a recent show in Wellington NZ at The Third Eye in March 2019. Photo by Gerry le Roux.
And something in me clicked again. And it was the realization of how fascinating it is that a three pound lump of matter in our skulls, through its activity, can create everything that we are and everything that we feel. And it struck me that trying to figure out how that works was a worthwhile pursuit. And that set me on a track that led eventually to grad school and down the line to my coming to New York three years ago to take up a position as a research scientist at NYU.
And then, last year, my dad had a stroke. As strokes go, we got lucky. By the time I took the transatlantic flight home, he was out of intensive care and in a rehabilitation unit. My brother met me at the airport and we drove to the hospital where we met my mum. Now, my dad's never been an emotionally effusive person, but it was still sad the way when we walked into his room, he didn't show that he was happy to see me or acknowledge in any way that this was the first time he'd seen me in almost a year and that I'd flown in from overseas. He was conscious and he was he was fairly coherent, but he seemed distracted and confused and a bit down.
One good thing was that I could be there for my family. I was brain guy. I was Spock! I knew what questions to ask doctors. I could interpret their answers for my family. And that felt good. About a week later, the doctors decided that my dad would do best in a familiar environment.
So we take him home where he does indeed seem to be getting stronger. The stroke has left him with no paralysis. He's a bit weak on his left side, but other than that, he's OK. And after about a week, we think he's strong enough to take a shower on his own. So I help him prepare and I start the water running and I go to the living room. And after about a minute I hear him calling my name. So I rush in and I find him standing there in his bathrobe, the water's running, and he says to me, “I can't take a shower, the bottom two thirds of my body are gone.” That's my dad, the computer programmer: Not ‘half’; not ‘a bit’. Two thirds. Because having a stroke is no reason to be numerically imprecise. I look at him and I look at his two legs sticking out the bottom of his bathrobe, and he sees me looking and he says, “Well, not gone, exactly, just… different.” And then he proceeds to tell me how the arrangement of his limbs has somehow been altered. And he starts with his right leg, which he says starts normally at the foot and then goes up to his knee, and then when it goes further up, instead of connecting to his pelvis, it continues to go up and past his shoulder and around to where it connects with his chest, which then in turn connects to his arms, which then connect to his left leg; and everything past the shoulder is happening above his head, which is okay, but makes it kind of hard to take a shower.
And I'm standing there and I'm thinking, holy shit. And then I can't help thinking, cool.
You see, there is a representation of the body in the brain. It's called the homunculus. There are actually several homunculi – there's one for the sense of touch, there's one for motion, there's one for proprioception, the sense of where your limbs are at any given time so that you can balance properly. And the homunculus is plastic, meaning it can change over time, through experience. For example, the representation of the fingers is larger in pianists. But I've never heard of a complete remapping, a complete rearrangement of the body representation following a stroke. This would make a fascinating case study. And I start thinking of all the various tests one could do to verify and to quantify the extent of this remapping. And I start also thinking about how we could maybe correlate the symptoms with the lesions that one can see in my dad's MRI. And I can't help rushing forward and thinking about the eventual scientific publication and how cool it would be to make my dad, who never finished high school, a co-author. And just then my dad says, very matter of factly, “Well, I'm peeing.” And I look and sure enough, there's a large wet stain forming on the front of his bathrobe. And as we both look helplessly, I feel embarrassed for him and ashamed of my own train of thought.
Later that night, I decide to do some Oliver-Sacks-style testing, and I sit my dad down and I say, “Dad, look, I'm going to touch your right foot. You see that?” And he says, “Yes.” I say, “Okay, I'm going to work my way up to your knee, and now up your thigh, and see, it does connect to the pelvis, doesn't it?” And he nods. And I go through the rest of his body and show him that everything's arranged normally. He keeps nodding, but I can see he's not convinced; he thinks there's something fishy going on. At night, when he goes to sleep, he builds a big barrier out of pillows at the edge of his bed, and when I ask him why he says that now that his body is rearranged and all chain-like he's afraid it's going to plop to the floor while he sleeps.
And later that night, I go to the computer and I make a list of all the symptoms he described and everything I can think of that might be worthwhile testing. And I keep updating this list over the next week or so. And about a week later, he's in the shower, which he has been able to negotiate for the last few days. And he calls me again and I rush in, but this time he's smiling. He says, “You were right! My body is back to normal. I don't know what I was thinking. It's all below my head again.”
David Carmel re-shares his story originally published in March 2011 at a recent show in Wellington NZ at The Third Eye in March 2019. Photo by Gerry le Roux.
And I'm mostly very relieved. Mostly. And that night I delete the list.
The following Thursday, it's dinner time. My brother and I and my mom and dad are sitting around the dinner table and my brother makes a comment about the 1940s, and that prompts my dad to start reminiscing. And he tells us all about his childhood, how he was born in Egypt and immigrated to Israel at the age of 10 and eventually became a military codebreaker and had a long, illustrious career doing that. Now, my dad was born in Jerusalem, and he did fight in two wars on the Israeli side. But he was an anti-aircraft gunner. He never had anything to do with codes or with breaking them, and to the best of my knowledge he's never been to Egypt. And I start thinking again: People with memory problems, with amnesias, often confabulate, which is a fancy word for making things up. We need this coherence in our own narrative, our own life story. And I'm thinking, is my dad amnesic? And my brother goes, “Dad, you’re from Jerusalem.” And he thinks for a minute and he goes; “Yeah, that's true too.” And now I'm really fascinated. Has something gone wrong with my dad's memory or is it the ability to distinguish memory from fantasy that's broken down?
And again, I start thinking of what could be done to examine this. But this time I stop. I don't make a list. Because it's still fascinating, but it's no longer cool. And this happens a few more times over the next few days, and then it also stops.
The thing about choosing to live on a different continent from your family is that it sharpens the distinction between when you're there and when you're not. And when you're there your own life gets left behind, and after about a month I need to get back to mine. I've done everything I could to help with my dad's rehabilitation routine. We've set up physical therapy and occupational therapy and a nurse who comes by the house, and only time will tell how much and how quickly my dad will improve further. And as I make the arrangements to go back to New York, I'm feeling guilty about the burden I'm leaving with my mom and brother – my brother, who's the real hero in all of this and whose only bad move has been the choice to live within driving distance from my parents. And I feel disappointed in what I've accomplished here, because I haven't figured anything out, and I haven't vanquished any Nazis, and I really haven't been much of a Spock.
It's about a month later I'm talking to my brother on the phone, and he's telling me about how that the daily grind is really taking its toll on our mom, who's still holding a demanding job, and how even with the help that he can offer, my dad just might not be getting the best care he could. And we get to talking about the unpleasant reality that we might need to consider that my dad might be better off in a care facility. And just then my dad wanders into the room that my brother's in. So my brother switches to speaker phone and I hear him as he gently fills my dad in about what we're talking about. He says, “Dad, you know we love you, and we want what's best for you, and we need to consider all the options.” And there's a long silence, which isn't surprising – my dad has always driven us crazy because he has to find exactly the right words.
But then when he speaks, his voice, for the first time in a long time, sounds like his pre-stroke voice. And he says, “I understand. I'm having a moment of clarity, and I want you to know that I love you all very much. And I know that you love me. And I trust you.”
And for the first time since all this began, I start to cry. There is nothing he could have said that would have been any cooler.
Part 2: Ralph Bouquet
It’s an unusually warm and clear spring day in Cambridge. I’m a sophomore in college balancing a burger in one hand and a stack of playing cards in the other. Members of to black Harvard student groups organized their annual tradition of a spring barbecue in the Quad, the Harvard Quad. It’s one of the grassy fields in the north part of the campus.
Now, in this scenario, I am the vice president of the Harvard Black Men’s Forum and we’re one of the organizers of the event, along with our sister organization, The Association of Black Harvard Women and we’re having a good time. But unbeknownst to us, while we’re playing our games of three-legged races, hopscotch, dodge ball, spades, of course, there are a couple of emails.
There's an email for it happening in one of the neighboring dorms. Essentially, several white students have begun to ask why a group of non-Harvard people from Dorchester, of course one of Boston’s historically black neighborhoods, had decided to invade the Harvard Quad and host their event there. Now, the emails began to pile up and, eventually, somebody decides to call the police. So we’re there and police show up.
I've had to prepare myself for interactions with the police at several points throughout my life and every single time there's a complex mix of emotions that I experience. The first most obvious and palpable emotion that I feel is usually fear, like the fear that I felt when I was ten years old watching a police officer interrogate my dad for having an out-of-state license plate. We were on a family road trip driving through Indiana, officer made my dad step out of the car.
Ralph Bouquet shares his story with the Story Collider audience at Oberon Theater in Boston, MA in October 2018. Photo by Kate Flock.
Occasionally, I also feel this weird mixture of shame and embarrassment. I felt that a few years ago. I was driving home from the movie theaters with my two younger sisters when we got into an accident. This elderly, old white man hit us. It was a slow collision. There wasn’t that much damage but he turned. It was clear he seemed to be a little bit disoriented and confused.
The officer who shows up on the scene begins interrogating me aggressively, even despite the fact that this old man has repeatedly said that it was his fault that he shouldn’t have been driving at night.
Sometimes occasionally I feel anger as well. I felt that anger two years ago. I was in New Orleans with a couple of friends. We were at Essence Fest, on our way to the concert. I remember a police officer almost slammed the door of our car on the leg of one of my friends. Apparently, we were getting dropped off in our Uber in one of the spots that wasn’t a designated drop off and so, rather than use his words, a cop decided to push the car door close as we were attempting to get out.
And every single time when these events happen, I’m also cycling through all the speeches and the warnings that most black men at some point in their lives have heard from their parents. Yet, even after all that, nothing still prepares me for that feeling of seeing two cops on motorcycles park and walk their way towards us, me and my group of friends.
So the cops show up. They start asking for some IDs. We show them IDs. We show them our paperwork. Harvard clearly knows we’re supposed to be there. In fact, the Harvard University Dining Services are actually preparing the burgers and the hotdogs that we’re eating during the course of the event, in between the three-legged races and the games of spades and dominos.
They leave. Everything is okay. But we try to get back to our festivities but it’s kind of hard to have fun after something like that happens to you. The mood has totally been soured. Everything has sort of changed.
We get back home, back to the dorms and everybody starts to see those emails and so we’re like, “You know what? We got to motivate. We got to get together and do something.”
So we do a demonstration and we organize the I Am Harvard Campaign. The premise of this is the radical notion that black students exist at Harvard and deserve to exist there. But even despite that, we do our campaign, we actually set some demands to the university some of which are still in place. We ask for more tutors of color, more facilitated discussions around race and discrimination during the freshman year, more diverse administrative staff. But even after all this, that fear that I feel still stays with me.
In college, I major in Psychology. That means I’m involved in quite a few research studies. In this case, I’m actually working as a confederate in these studies. Not that type of confederate. So in psychology, a confederate is a person, usually an actor, who pretends to play the role of a subject in a research study, but in actuality they are actually working alongside the researcher but the other participants usually don’t know that.
So it’s a year later now after this incident on the Quad and the PI, the principal investigator of the lab that I’m working in approaches me and asks me if I’m interested in a summer job. She describes what the experiment is. She's investigating whether increases in cortisol, which is a stress hormone, in response to a stressful social interaction, affects decision making, particularly around threat-related decision making.
So I’m like, “All right. That sounds pretty cool. That sounds good.”
She then lets me know that, in fact, the stressful social situation that she's investigating involves racial bias.
I’m like, “Okay, interesting.”
Then she reveals to me the population that she's studying, police officers.
So I’m like, “All right. I don't know about this. I’m a little interested but I’m also a little bit anxious, because here’s an opportunity to do something really cool, to do some really cool research but by engaging in stressful interactions with members of an organization that I've spent my entire life trying to avoid as a black man.”
But, man, money talks. When you are broke, all financial aid in college, sometimes you end up picking up some weird jobs.
So first day of the study, here I am in the Cambridge Police Department. Got my suit and tie on ready to do this study. In this study, I’m not a confederate this time. I’m actually an actor in a role play scenario. So I’m engaging with police officers in a role play. They play the role of sergeant who has to deal with a complaint and I’m a young lawyer who’s coming to the police department to make a complaint about another officer who mistreated me poorly. Let’s call this officer Officer Jones.
So I walk into the room, and there's always a police officer there hooked up to an EKG and several other physiological monitors. In addition to cortisol, which is taken via saliva sample, we’re also looking at their heart rate. We’re measuring their blood pressure as well during this experiment.
So here’s the role play scenario. I walk in and I’m a young lawyer. I describe the scenario and I make my complaint to them. Here’s my complaint. A couple of nights ago, I was walking from the bar with a couple of friends. We just had a few drinks, good time, walking down the street we’re making jokes. We’re laughing. Somebody decides to call the cops on us.
Okay. I split off from the group and then, while I’m walking away from the group, the police officer who’s called on the scene sees me, approaches me, calls me a drunken son of a bitch, slams me against the car. He's really aggressive, verbally and physically aggressive with me. So that’s my complaint.
Now, usually the police officer there gives me sort of the canned department response, right? You know, “Sorry about that. We’re going to look into this.”
And I retort, “You know what? What are you all looking into? I mean, we have witnesses who saw what happened. Here I am telling you the situation. Like you all need to do something about this.”
So we sort of engage in this back and forth, and this is sort of the key stressful interaction.
Then I flip the switch. So I have a script that I’m working off of that I memorize and here’s the key line in the script where things really start to get a little testy.
So at one point I go, “You know what, sergeant, you and I both know this. Officer Jones treated me the way he did because of my race, because I’m black. Whoever called the police they called the police because they saw a group of black men walking in their neighborhood and they got nervous. But guess what? This is our neighborhood too. We live here too, okay?”
Ralph Bouquet shares his story with the Story Collider audience at Oberon Theater in Boston, MA in October 2018. Photo by Kate Flock.
Now, range of responses happens after I say this line, ranging from reluctant apologies to open antagonistic sort of responses. I remember in one particular case, this one officer, after I say that line, he looks at me and he rolls his eyes and he goes, “Come on.”
So then I press him. Next line is, “Sergeant do you honestly think you would have treated me this way if I was white?”
He completely shuts down. He goes, “Okay, buddy.” Shifts back in his seat, completely checks out for the rest of the role play.
I’m like, “All right. Interesting.”
And it’s one of those interesting moments where I sort of realize that, in many ways, many police officers operate under the full impression that the law will always be on their side because they're in a situation where when one of their own does something bad they get to investigate one of their own.
That study ends and it’s now my senior year of college and I’m doing what most college seniors do. I’m trying to live it up. I've got last bit of college freedom and fun left.
So I’m at a party. Maybe the party is a little bit loud. The music is a little bit too loud than it should be. Maybe it’s a little bit too late. Maybe we’re a little bit too close to some other residential housing and so somebody makes a noise complaint and they call the cops. This time the situation is a little bit different because I’m in a mix-race group of friends. I've got some of my white male friends with me. We’re at this party.
Now, engaging with the police when you’re with your white friends is always a pretty interesting situation. I’m always baffled by this sudden increase in patience and the second chances and the warnings that seem to get conjured out of thin air.
In this scenario, I’m really shocked because I’m listening and these white boys are arguing with the cops. They're yelling at them telling them that they have lawyer dads who will come and do this, who will take their badge numbers.
And I’m like, I try to be a rational reasonable person. I’m like, “You know what? Guys, we’re kind of clearly in the wrong here. It’s 2:30 a.m. on a Thursday night. Let’s just wrap this up, pull the plug and go inside and play Smash Bros. What are we doing here?”
So I decide to, all right, I’m going to go outside and I’m going to see if I can sort of deal with this situation because I happen to be the most sober person in the building.
So I walk outside and I’m like, “Officers, I’m really, really sorry for this. Totally we apologize for this. We’ll shut the music down. We’ll shut the party down. We really apologize for causing a disturbance. This won’t happen again.”
Then one of the officers looks at me, pauses for a second and he goes, “Hey, aren’t you that asshole from that experiment last summer?”
In my mind I’m like, “Damn.” I’m completely shook.
And in the back of my mind I’m running through all these stories of police retaliation that I've heard growing up. Of course, this is before smartphones are ubiquitous, before all the faces and the names of the dead black men and women that you now see on your screens used to only be on t-shirts and murals in the communities where I’m from.
So I’m speechless. I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to say next and then the officer sort of continues talking and he goes, “You know what? This prick almost gave me a fucking heart attack last year.”
The other officers start laughing. I take their cue and I started laughing too. I’m nervous. I’m doing nervous laughter.
And they start badgering me with questions asking me, “Oh, so how much do you get paid to scare cops, huh?” I’m just terrified but I’m answering their questions.
As we start to talk I realize, all right, the tension has started to deflate a little bit. Maybe I might be able to get out of this. This might be okay. But, at the same time, this is one of those moments where I truly begin to realize that this confrontation and the fear that I feel really reveals the freedom and the power that these police officers have to do whatever they want.
So I apologize. I go back inside. My group of friends were inside. They're completely stunned at what just happened. But I’m shaking because I don't like these interactions at all. I wish I could say that after that interaction that my fear of police officers suddenly disappeared but if you've been paying attention to the news, it really didn’t. It never has for me.
So I’m inside the house and looking outside the window making sure to see if they’ve left. I hear them laughing as they walk back to the squad cars, pull up and drive off into the night.
Part 3: Cindy Joe
When I was just out of college, I had a pet snail. This was when I was still living in Portland, Oregon. I had bought a box of strawberries from a fruit stand in a hurry and I hadn’t noticed until I got home that there was a little hitchhiker inside. So I decided to keep him. I named him Professor Snailworthy.
What I didn’t realize until I had one was how much personality snails have. He had favorite foods. He'd hide in his shell when his cage got too dirty. (Very fastidious.) He loved to sit in his water dish. And eventually, he outgrew the strawberry box and a friend bought him a terrarium to live in. He would crawl up to the lid and sort of stick there by suction, hanging upside down like a bat.
Well, needless to say, I absolutely doted on the little guy. Whenever I'd go on trips, I would get him a snail sitter. We would go on outings to the park. We’d go by bus. Sometimes I'd get kind of strange looks, but not that many, because it was Portland.
So we’d get off the bus at the park and I would open the lid of his cage and let him out onto the grass, to sort of taste the grasses of freedom…feel the wind in his eyestalks. At some point I would scoop him back in and we would go home.
Cindy Joe shares her story with her Fermilab colleagues at a show done in collaboration with the Fermilab at Ramsey Auditorium in Batavia, IL in May 2018. Photo by Sean Cochran.
Well, Professor Snailworthy grew, and I think he thrived. He grew from a size that I hadn’t noticed in a strawberry box to maybe three to four inches long from nose to tail, with a shell the size of a key lime. Wow, right?
And I came up with this whole imaginary backstory in which maybe he would just not stop growing. He would just keep growing and growing and growing until one day he would get so big that he would break out of the backyard and go exploring. And maybe people would think that he was a monster rampaging the city, and they would get scared…until I showed up. And he would remember that I had loved and taken care of him and he would let me take him home.
I even sort of drew little draft sketches for a comic. Just remember that you heard it here first. And Hollywood, I'll be waiting to hear from you about movie options.
Well, during this time I moved from Portland to the Chicago suburbs. Of course, Professor Snailworthy went with me. I’m kind of a rule follower so I looked up the airlines’ policies on snail transport. I don't know why, but I couldn’t find any.
But I didn’t just want to stuff him in my suitcase and hope for the best. So I popped him in my water bottle, put plastic wrap over the top and poked little breathing holes. I packed him in my backpack and we both boarded the plane to our new life. I figured if anybody saw his silhouette on the x-ray and asked me any probing questions, I would say that I was a collector of seashells. But nobody asked me any questions.
So I'd moved out here to Fermilab to become a particle accelerator operator. So the thing was, I was moving across the country on my own, from my college town which I loved…across the country, to a place where it snowed and I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t know anyTHING either.
This job is so unique that they had to train me from the ground up, on the job. And that meant that I was surrounded by the world’s experts and I was asking them what felt like incredibly stupid questions. The whole time I’m sort of battling to tamp down that part of my ego that needs to prove that I’m really smart too…so that I can actually be open to all the new things that I need to learn. Which is basically every single part of every single machine.
And the thing about the accelerators is they also operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, so everybody works a rotating shift schedule. You know, days, evenings, weekends, holidays, all of it. So it’s actually pretty tough to make outside friends. It’s a pretty tough lifestyle, especially when you're spending up to sixty hours a week at work.
At first, I thought I might bond with my fellow operators, but I didn’t really fit in. After a while, I started to feel invisible. I'd hear about what a good time everyone else was having at the activities that I hadn’t actually been invited to. Or when I brought up wanting to participate in a project, I'd be told they were already done, thanks.
I'd bring up my ideas but sometimes I'd feel completely overrun, like nobody was really listening to me at all, even in some situations where I was the one who was supposed to be in charge. I didn’t really think they were doing it on purpose, exactly, but I felt forgotten. And, to be honest, that isn’t really a better feeling.
There could sometimes be periods of four or five days in a row in which I would maybe have no real-life contact with other human beings, and that was a really tough time.
Well, I'd graduated into, unfortunately, the worst part of the recession. So I didn’t really feel like I could just leave, because of a small thing like feeling really unhappy. Lots of people were genuinely worse off. And besides, I was kind of worried that maybe it was my fault that people didn’t like me, because I wasn’t likeable. They didn’t believe the things I said because I wasn’t knowledgeable. And they didn’t listen to me because I wasn’t worth listening to.
Well, there were a few things that kept me going in this period. One was my personal stubbornness; and another was my fundamental belief in the value of what I was doing. I was so in love with physics. I felt like I was in a unique position. I had access on the ground level to… I was on the ground level of big science and I had a level of access a few people on the planet had. And that some of the great discoveries of physics were due, in small part, to my training and experience and my knowledge. And that maybe humanity would know more about the vast universe around us because I was working hard and really devoted to my job.
Late at night when everything was running smoothly and there was a sort of humming and beeping and buzzing, I felt a sense of peace and of the rightness of things. Whenever I adjusted the machines all shift and I got a three percent increase in output, I felt proud. Whenever there were big discoveries announced, and somebody got the Nobel Prize, and that was partly because of contributions from experiments here at Fermilab…which worked because of the work that I and my co-workers were doing, I felt like it was almost as if maybe one-millionth of that Nobel Prize was mine.
Cindy Joe shares her story with her Fermilab colleagues at a show done in collaboration with the Fermilab at Ramsey Auditorium in Batavia, IL in May 2018. Photo by Sean Cochran.
This had been what I had been wanting to discover when I moved out here, if this was something that I could devote my life to. And the answer felt like yes.
In retrospect, what I had been looking for was some type of validation. I wanted somebody else to notice me and tell me that I was good enough. And the stakes had been built up so high that it became all I thought about. If there's anything that scientists are good at, it is taking in data and drawing their own conclusions from it. And based upon the input I was getting, I had concluded that I must not belong there.
But in my loneliest periods there was one living, moving creature around. And as far as Professor Snailworthy was concerned, the sun rose and set on me…and my mango scraps. At some point, maybe with his help, I realized that my core beliefs that every single person mattered and had fundamental, inherent value should maybe also apply…to myself. That my different perspective was important. That my experiences were real, and that my contributions were good. That I deserved no less gentle kindness and consideration than anyone else, and maybe I should treat myself like it. That was a shift in mindset that helped pull me out of my funk.
There is this concept in chemistry: the nucleation site. Conditions can be all ready for solid crystals to form out of a liquid solution, but maybe nothing will happen. Lots of times nothing will happen, until a seed crystal is introduced. And I've often thought that friendship works the same way. That lots of times it’s not until you make one new friend then you meet all their friends and now, hey, you've got twenty new friends.
That’s what happened to me. Through that one friend I started meeting other people outside of my bubble and I started making a lot of new friends in my own right. I still worked a lot of weird hours, and I still worked a lot of weird times, but I started to feel like somebody who mattered again. Somebody that people would miss if she was gone.
Well, one day, after we’d been together for about three years, I noticed that the Professor was being a little bit slow. I mean, he was a snail, but more than usual. But I was kind of busier now. I'd started to get known around the department for being good at what I did, so that opened up all kinds of opportunities. I was doing a lot of outreach, I was serving on committees, I was volunteering for everything I could. So I didn’t spend as much time with him anymore. I'd change his water, I'd put in his food, but I didn’t just sort of sit and watch him anymore. We didn’t spend as much quality time together.
Then one day, I noticed that he'd been inside of his shell for a while. He'd never really done that for so long before, so I started to worry that maybe something was seriously wrong. I sprayed him with water. I put in his favorite foods. I actually picked him up and put him in his water dish, but he barely moved. Eventually, I had to accept that he was gone, and he was never going to come out again.
I miss my Professor. If there is such a thing, he was a good snail. His tenure may not have been long, but he taught me a lot of things about patience, about life. About being picky about your choices, but happy with the life that you make.
He taught me to look at things from a different perspective, even if that means that you have to hang upside down for a while. He taught me to feel the grass under my feet and the wind in my eyestalks. And he taught me that sometimes it is possible for you to grow, and to change, even if everyone thinks that you are too small.
He helped me make friends. (Having a weird pet is a surprisingly great conversation starter.) And he was the thing that I packed most carefully to take from my old life to my new. Then, after a while, he taught me how to let go.
Someday, maybe, I will again be the girl with the weird pet. But I will never get over being grateful that I'd bought that particular box of strawberries, and I will never forget my first snail. Thank you.
Part 4: Rachel Yehuda
During my fifth year of graduate school, I made a decision that would change my life. I decided to stop killing rodents. I had been studying the effects of stress hormones on brain function on rats, and I loved the topic. I loved doing brain surgeries on the animals but I hated stressing them, and I really hated chopping their heads off with the rat guillotine to get their brains. We called this sacrificing. I was doing so much sacrificing that I started to have nightmares about it and that’s why I decided to stop.
Now, my graduate school advisor was concerned. Well, he was about to lose his most experienced assassin, but he also worried about my career. Without having animal brains, how would I succeed as a neuroscientist? So he strongly advised me to reconsider.
But instead, I got pregnant and I decided it was time to start living with my husband, Mitch. We had been married for almost four years already but I hadn’t found the time to move in with him because I was so busy in graduate school.
So I moved out of state. I had a baby, a boy, Daniel. I somehow managed to write my dissertation. I did some retraining in psychology and I landed a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale Medical School in the Psychiatry Department. And the best part of that was no rats.
Rachel Yehuda shares her story with the Story Collider audience at The Jerome L. Greene Space in a show done in collaboration with Studio 360 and WNYC in May 2016. Photo by Nicholas Santasier.
So it’s 1988 and I’m at the West Haven VA. There's a new diagnosis and it’s called posttraumatic stress disorder, PTSD, and it’s controversial. That’s because stress effects go away when you remove the stressor. But the Vietnam veterans at the VA behaved like they were still in combat even though the war had been over for nearly two decades. They had depression and anxiety and nightmares and that’s why they established the diagnosis. But a lot of people thought that’s just regular mental illness and it has nothing to do with combat trauma.
As for me, I just couldn’t understand why there needed to be a controversy when we just measure stress hormones. And who best to do that better than me? No one.
So I really thought I was at the right place at the right time but, certainly, if stress hormones were elevated, this would be proof that the Vietnam veterans were still under stress. But when I measured the hormone cortisol, our levels were low in those with PTSD. It didn’t make any sense to me and I couldn’t explain it unless of course I had done something wrong. So we decided to repeat the experiment.
Of course I was praying for a different outcome. High levels of cortisol that would have legitimized the diagnosis and, of course, it would have legitimized me too. But the results came out the same. Cortisol levels were lower in combat veterans with PTSD.
So I started to get really excited. Here was a juicy mystery to solve and I published the findings thinking that everybody would be excited too. I could not have been prepared for what happened next.
Advocates for the diagnosis were really upset. The data had apparently undermined a political cause and people started saying such derogatory things about my research, questioning my data and my methods and my conclusions and even my motives. It’s all still there in the scientific literature for anyone to read. But the point is my brand new career was taking a nosedive and I had to do something fast.
But I was pregnant again. So I had my baby, a girl, Erica. And during my two-week maternity leave, unpaid, I had plenty of time to think. I knew that I had done the cortisol measures correctly and also my gut told me that the Vietnam veterans were not exaggerating the effects of combat. So what are we looking at here? Could it be that something had gone wrong with the normal stress response that was preventing recovery? Or maybe it wasn’t normal stress at all but traumatic stress. Maybe somehow the effects of trauma are different in a way that explains why symptoms persist.
I knew that what I needed to do to understand this was try to come up with some examples of long-lasting effects of trauma from my professional clinical experience. But I didn’t have any. So I had to think about this based on my personal experience.
I grew up in the Jewish community of Cleveland Ohio, which was also home to hundreds of holocaust survivors who emigrated from DP Camps following the war. I figured the holocaust is at least as bad as Vietnam. Many of the children of holocaust survivors were my classmates and my friends. Had we ever talked about the holocaust? Were their parents suffering?
I remember the first time in the ‘60s when someone tried to tell me what a concentration camp was and all I could do was conjure up images of summer camp. And in the ‘70s, we used to have all of these discussions about whether the holocaust could happen again in the United States. I really thought those were rhetorical questions. I guess I felt safe. But I could see that my friends who had holocaust-survivor parents were actually, in some way, preparing for this possibility.
Now, my father being a rabbi in the community and also my mother, I guess they had many occasions to interact with survivors. So in retrospect, now that I thought of it, there were hushed whispers that so-and-so was orphaned at an early age, parents brutally murdered. And there was one family that cooked, ate, and slept in their basement leaving two floors above unoccupied. I guess they still felt like they were in hiding.
So I grew increasingly focused on holocaust survivors. I’m breastfeeding my little Erica thinking, “I wonder what cortisol levels are like in holocaust survivors?”
So when I came back, I couldn’t wait to tell my postdoctoral mentor my idea. I said, “We have to measure cortisol levels in holocaust survivors.”
And he said, “You know, it’s a good idea, but where would we find money for this project? And how are you going to find holocaust survivors at Yale?”
But I already knew. “We should go to Cleveland. It’s only 500 miles away. We could drive there in ten hours. And we could all stay at my parents’ house. They have four bedrooms. And my mother would cook for us.” I didn’t really think we needed money. What we needed was to get holocaust survivors to agree to talk to a stranger, a psychiatrist, and relieve their most traumatic experiences and catalog 50 years of mental health symptoms and then give me their blood and urine so I can measure stress hormones. And that’s not something money can buy, let me tell you.
To even give you a better perspective, one of my friends said that I would be the first person to do biologic research on holocaust survivors since Mengele.
But I was undeterred. I figured I would do some public speaking, town halls, focus groups, get buy-in. I just needed the right pitch.
So at the first venue, I decided that truth is my right pitch. And I said I'd been working with Vietnam veterans and now I want to see whether holocaust survivors are similar. And a man got up and said, “They had guns. We were defenseless, hunted like pray. You can’t compare us. It’s totally different.” I was not expecting that response.
But I learned something important from it. Trauma survivors are really focused on how their experiences make them different from other people. So the next time, I said holocaust survivors are unique. They can’t be compared to anyone and that’s because they endured the unimaginable and are amazing examples of coping and resilience.
Rachel Yehuda shares her story with the Story Collider audience at The Jerome L. Greene Space in a show done in collaboration with Studio 360 and WNYC in May 2016. Photo by Nicholas Santasier.
And a woman got up and said, “I’m not an example of that. I have a lot of symptoms. I have a lot of nightmares. And my survival was pure chance. Sounds like you're interested in studying luck.” So I wasn’t expecting that either.
But the good news about that was that here I had been tiptoeing around this whole idea of mental health symptoms because, let’s face it, I grew up with these people. But maybe it was okay to talk about symptoms. So the third time, I knew exactly what to do.
I went in and I said, “I’m sure many of you in this room still have nightmares and suffer as a result of the holocaust. If we can just locate the biologic source of these symptoms, we could develop treatments and end the suffering.”
I really thought I had broken through, but a man got up and he said, “Biologic? Science? You mean like the ones the Nazis used to justify exterminating the Jews in the first place? Are you trying to give Hitler a posthumous victory? It’s not enough that he has our victims and now you want to give him the ammunition to be able to claim our survivors as his casualties?” He was so angry, and all I could think of at that moment was that I missed my rats.
With rats, I never had to walk this tightrope between stigmatizing the effects of what I had done to them and validating their symptoms. But the truth was I was really deflated and I really didn’t know what to say. I was completely out of pitches.
In frustration, I turned to a woman that I had known for a long time as we were walking out and I said, “I just don’t understand. I’m just asking for urine, something you're gonna throw out anyway. If I can learn something from it, why won’t you help me?”
She looked at me and she said, “If Rabbi Yehuda wants my urine, he can have it.”
What? What a strange thing to say. And what does my father have to do with anything? But then I understood. It was my father’s goodness and dedication to the truth qualities so strong that if he asked for urine, his students trusted him enough to just give it to him.
So it wasn’t about the pitch, it was about the trust. You can’t do human research if people don’t trust you to be dedicated to the truth. I knew that I would have to earn that trust. Eventually, I must have because people started agreeing to be in the study. And when they did, I got to take a whole group of my Yale colleagues to Cleveland.
We borrowed a centrifuge and pipettes and lab supplies and we set up a laboratory in my parents’ basement and we used my mother’s cleaned-out freezer to store specimens. And we made arrangements to interview holocaust survivors in the comfort of their own home.
On the way down, I gave my crew some really critical instructions. I said, “You know, they're gonna offer you coffee and cake. Take it. Ask for seconds, and then you can stay and get all the stories you need.”
And when we measured cortisol levels in holocaust survivors we found that they were low, but only if the survivors had PTSD. That turned out to be an important breakthrough.
But why did so many of them have PTSD fifty years later? More than half of them that we interviewed did. And why hadn’t they spoken up about their symptoms in the past? One woman explained it really well to me. She said, “The veterans, they have VAs. Where would we go? We don’t have anywhere to go to be treated for what happened to us.”
And those words resonated deeply. I felt in them an obligation. Holocaust survivors had just given something to me and now I would have to give something back.
A few months later, I’m interviewing for a job at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry and I told the chairman that one of the things I want to do is develop a Holocaust Clinic in New York. He said it was a great idea. In fact, a moral imperative, and he would help maybe even financially.
We did set up the clinic. We saw hundreds of holocaust survivors and their offspring who also came complaining about their symptoms. A few years later, I finally got invited to give my first plenary talk at an international meeting. I was so excited, but I was also so pregnant with my third child, Rebecca. But I had to go. I knew that the cortisol findings were still considered dubious and I had to take this opportunity to explain them.
So I flew halfway around the world. I got to the meeting. I waddled up to the podium. I said, “Hi, I’m Rachel Yehuda. I’m pregnant. Does anyone know how I got this way? Of course, you all do. Sex. Pregnancy results from sex.”
Oh, I should tell you that at that time that was actually a requirement.
“But I’m sure a lot of you have had that too and yet not everyone in this room is pregnant. For pregnancy to occur following sex, it can only happen to some people and only under the conditions where the hormonal environment is just right. What I'd like to tell you today is that I think the same thing is true about trauma and PTSD.”
“PTSD doesn’t happen to everyone who’s exposed to trauma. It may just be in some people and only when the hormonal environment is just right. And having low cortisol levels at the time of the trauma may make it really difficult to suppress the body’s adrenaline levels which creates the perfect environment for PTSD to develop.”
I've just told you the story of my first few years as a scientist. I had to be productive or my career wouldn’t launch. But I also had to be reproductive or my family wouldn’t launch. To my surprise, I found that the synergy of these two threads helped me find my scientific voice. Thank you.