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“The Purpose of Science Is Hope:” An Interview with Monica Dus, 2023 Guggenheim Fellow in Biology 

 

In September, we interviewed Monica Dus, a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow in Biology. An associate professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at the University of Michigan, she is the principal investigator of the Dus Laboratory of Nutrigenomics, focusing on the intersection of food, genes, and the brain. Dus grew up in Italy and moved to the United States for college. She has always been guided by curiosity and a drive to share the wonder of the world with others. We spoke about how the body seeks balance, her role as “Nature Troubadour,” and the work she’ll be focusing on for her Guggenheim Fellowship year. 

 

GF: I’d love to hear more about what sparked your love for science in general, and then, more specifically, what contributed to your initial fascination with the connection between genetics, food, and the brain. 

MD: I’ve loved science for as long as I can remember. In second grade, I was asked to draw a picture of myself as a grown-up, doing my ideal profession, and I drew myself in a lab coat. I wrote that I would be a nuclear scientist orthodontist. My dad was an orthodontist… [Laughs.] I don’t really know how I knew of “scientist,” but I was always that kid that would pick flowers, look at bugs, trip over rocks because I was always daydreaming. I’m still like that. I was always a curious person and someone in love with the world. I think of science as the art of loving life and discovering what’s underneath the sense of marvel: almost having an extra pair of eyes to see the unseen. 

In terms of food and genes, I think it was a product of my environment. Growing up, especially in high school and college, genetics was very much part of the conversation because the human genome was being sequenced, and many other genomes were completed. Around the same time, while taking AP Biology I learned about the lac operon, which is how scientists first discovered the logic of genetic switches and how genes are turned off and on. This particular genetic switch is turned off or on depending on the presence of lactose, the sugar in milk. The mechanism mesmerized me—it was completely beautiful and elegant. I didn’t know anything about molecular biology at the time, and I remember thinking: that’s completely crazy. There are tiny molecular machines inside my body that I cannot see. And they’re making everything work. That really got me interested in the idea of the interactions of genes and the environment, which has defined my entire research arc.  

The other thing that changed my view of genetics was reading the biography of Seymour Benzer, Time, Love, and Memory. Benzer was the father of the field of neurogenetics. He started with dissecting the basic anatomy of genes and then moved on to understanding how genes direct really complex things like behavior: our ability to tell time, our sleeping patterns, attraction, memory… Reading the book, it was amazing to learn that genes don’t just determine your eye or hair color, but also the behavioral traits that make up a personality. Today, when I teach this, my students are like, “duh.” But back then it was a really major thing. I really fell in love with possibility. And I wanted to know more about it. 

I think of science as the art of loving life and discovering what’s underneath the sense of marvel: almost having an extra pair of eyes to see the unseen. 

GF: I find it so interesting that what some might have thought was just a teenage fascination became a powerful, guiding force for your entire life. Did you go to college thinking, “This is what I want to focus on; this is what I want to do?” 

MD: 100%. I was extremely lucky that my dad fostered my curiosity since I was little. I would ask one question and he would ask me more rather than giving me answers. He helped me learn English, and then obtain a scholarship to study in the US. The moment I got to university, I pretty much immediately started pestering my genetics professor, Dr. Ben Aaronson. I constantly asked him about genetics and fruit flies, brought him science papers, and inquired about things I never heard about, like transposons. My professor realized I was… a little different. And he was spending so much time talking to me about science that he invited me to do an independent study. He also took me to visit the Benzer lab at Caltech! He was the best professor and I was so lucky to find him; he really nurtured my passion for science and for discovery. So yes, I knew I wanted to study molecular biology. I knew I didn’t want to go to medical school. I wanted to be a scientist and work in a lab. I felt that was my mission. 

GF: Do you have a memory of your first discovery? 

MD: Many scientists feel a lot of excitement and motivation for discovery, but for me it’s not so much about the discovery as it is about being an explorer. When I met my husband 23 years ago, he told me I was a “Nature Troubadour:” it’s more the sense of awe, rather than the intellectual dissection that drives me. I feel like that every time I read a paper or my students show me data: nature is just so amazing to behold. 

GF: Discovery for the sake of discovery! I’m wondering if you recall any moments in college or grad school that encapsulate those moments of recognizing that sense of beauty or awe in nature. 

MD: It’s more like a pervasive sensation—when things come together and you get a glimpse of the logic, or a process gets illuminated. So much of science is the uncomfortable sensation of not knowing, right? You have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. But at some point, that discomfort of not knowing turns into something making sense. And then you can see the splendor. Before, it’s exciting because you see little glimpses of light, and then you get to see the full firmament. 

I think I actually get to experience this more often now that I’m a principal investigator. There are so many different projects going on in my lab and I have the privilege to see the bigger picture. After months or years of research, we have these moments of revelation and it’s stunning.

GF: Where the unknown becomes the known! 

MD: Yes, exactly! And it’s just completely bonkers: your hypotheses were wrong, or your hypotheses were right, but either way, things become illuminated. Earlier in my career, I think a lot of the time I got bogged down by the immediate. Now, I have the privilege of a bigger view. 

GF: Could you tell me more about what your lab is focusing on right now, and what you are particularly excited about? 

MD: Our lab is trying to understand more intimately the connections between nutrients and basic biological processes. So, we’re trying to rethink the role of food from something passive (such as just being fuel or building blocks that are digested and then used) to something that’s much more active. That’s the fundamental scientific aim. Then, our goal is to link this basic biology to public health and human life because nutrition and diet are so central to them. We know that many diseases and early mortality or longevity have so much to do with diet, but how that works [is what my lab is interested in]. We first examined the effects of nutrients on the brain, and specifically focused on taste, because we try to start with questions that are experimentally tractable: areas where we have good tools, good assays, that allow us to go from understanding the biological processes to the impact and the physiology of that particular organ or tissue or system, and then to disease. And then from that, we look for opportunities to tie the findings to potential policies for nutrition. For example, one of our main areas of research now is on early diagnostic and supplementation strategies. 

So, we started by looking at the effects of diet on taste and eating, specifically focusing on sugar. We all inadvertently consume a lot of sugar: 70-80% of food in the grocery store contains added sugar. 

GF: Is that for American grocery stores specifically? 

MD: Yes, correct. We found that the more sugar in the diet, the more the taste system becomes desensitized to it. While some look at this through the lens of addiction, we study the neurophysiology of the tongue. Our studies show that with high dietary sugar, the animals’ ability to sense sweetness dulls, meaning that sugar tastes less sweet, and presumably less “good.”      

And since signals from the mouth reach the brain, changes in how sugar is tasted, also affect how higher brain circuits “see” it. Our lab (and others) found that diets high in sugar affect neurotransmitters like dopamine and the eating patterns they modulate. Currently, we’re wrapping up this area of research and examining how parental nutrition affects the development of the offspring. We know that parents’ diets play a role in the lifelong health trajectory of the child and can contribute to disease risk and even early mortality.                                                                                                                       

We are taking a nutrient-first approach to this question and asking which nutrients we inherit directly from our parents, how they change with their diet, and how they affect early biological processes like cell differentiation.  

GF: What do you find to be common misconceptions about the connection between nutrition and the brain? What do you wish more people understood? 

MD: I try to refocus attention on the nutrients and to communicate that food affects the brain in many ways. In school we learn that food is eaten, broken down, and finally taken up by cells in the body. The brain comes later. But the brain can respond to food even before we eat it! The brain in fact responds to the sight and smell of food: these early responses are crucial to preparing the body to receive food. Eating is a tumultuous experience: think about all those nutrients arriving in such a short time, having to be processed in the right way, while ensuring that the important physiological parameters stay balanced. The brain’s early food responses prime the body to deal with that tumult. Second, some brain cells, also known as neurons, directly respond to nutrients, like sugars, without waiting for the food to be processed in the gut for hours. In that sense, the brain is using these nutrients as signals, rather than fuel or building blocks.  

 

                                             

GF: So, does your brain prepare differently when it sees that you’re about to eat a slice of cake, compared to, say, carrots? 

MD: Yes. One of the fundamental things that our brain does is keep you alive as you go about your day in the world. It does this by focusing on things that will kill or benefit you. And as it accumulates information about these, it also creates memories and expectations that it uses to predict what today will be based on yesterday and the days before. So when you see that carrot, assuming you have had carrots before, you know it will be moderately sweet, crunchy, and not very filling, right? You know also that would probably have to eat more carrots than you could physically eat to get all the energy you need from a meal. But then you look at carrot cake: you immediately have a different reaction to it. If you’ve eaten it before, you know that it’s perfectly sweet, moist, and with different textures and flavors in its layers. The flavors blend, chewing doesn’t require a lot of work, and the cake actually melts in your mouth and pervades it with deliciousness. And you know there is a sense of satisfaction that will come from eating it because you’ve experienced that previously. That experience has become encoded in memory and expectation in your brain. When you see the carrot or the carrot cake again, you recall those expectations. So, the brain prepares us psychologically and physiologically for food.  

In a way that is the basis of mindful eating, which has been a big thing recently. Most people, including me, often inhale lunch at the desk while working. But if instead we are present as we eat, like if we are actually thinking about what we’re eating, how we’re eating, and how it’s affecting our bodies in the moment, and later on, then the brain can update memories and expectations in ways that help us make food choices aligned with health goals. 

So, to summarize, I think it is important to understand some of the very basics, but often forgotten aspects of food: it is not just energy; it is also a signal, and it can affect the brain and body in many ways, directly and indirectly, and not just through the amount of calories or energy that we eat.                 

GF: I was thinking about the difference between hunger and cravings. Does that present differently in the brain? Hunger, I feel like, must be more physiological: your stomach is growling, it feels empty. But craving sometimes feels more psychological, though I wonder if your brain is trying to tell you what your body needs. 

MD: Absolutely. Both are physiological and psychological. 

We know that, from both animal and human studies, the body always tries to get back to a state of balance. So, for instance, if the amount of protein in the diets of animals decreases, their ability to detect protein in food increases. If we decrease the amount of sugar in our diet, our sensory system gets tuned up; if animals have too much sugar, their sensory system gets tuned down. So, there are robust physiological aspects of need-based “cravings,” but cues in your surroundings also trigger psychological aspects. So I think of it a combination of the physiology and the higher-order processes that then create the “habit.” This is well understood with addictions like smoking: it’s not just the nicotine one’s get when smoking a cigarette, it’s also being in the place where you’ve smoked a cigarette before. Essentially, your brain can extend the boundary of that salient memory to the things that were around when you formed it. 

Food may not be too different: Say, it’s later at night, and you’ve had dinner already. Time has passed. Your body has refound the equilibrium from the tumult of having dinner and re-regulating all your systems. And now you feel a desire for something else. You make yourself tea, but remember that when you have tea, you typically have a cookie with it… It’s just so good together! And so, the memory of tea plus cookie is triggered and then extended to include after-dinner, and then with time, whenever you are in a similar context, say a few hours after dinner in your living room, you start craving that cookie …                 

GF: That’s so interesting. What you’re doing in your lab is taking all of these disparate ways we experience the world and understanding how we try to nourish ourselves in various ways. 

MD: I feel like it’s just really confusing to try to figure out what one should eat. What I wish for my work and the work of everyone who studies nutrition is to make the process easier. Because when something is easier, it doesn’t require as much bandwidth. If the types and portions of food available were such that making a choice that supported and protected health was easier, we would make those choices by “default,” without having to invest a lot of bandwidth when we don’t have it. I think this vision requires a whole society’s effort to achieve and should not be left to the in-the-moment individual choices. It seems easy, but it is not.                           

GF: One thing I loved learning about your work is how passionate you are about communicating your findings, not just to other scientists, but to the general public, including kids. I’d love to hear more about why you’ve made that a cornerstone of your work. 

MD: I think it happened because I just love talking about science. Fundamentally, I think that everyone is a scientist, especially kids. They’re really curious, and curiosity is a pathway to joy. As we get older, we kind of lose that sense of doing what brings us bliss. But science is a way to reconnect with that curiosity and a sense of awe and give people a sense of purpose. And science is also a powerful way of connecting people because we all share the same world, the same physiology, and the same biology: we can shape the whole of the human community around it. And finally, I love getting to share the beauty of nature with others. The stereotype is that scientists are lonely weirdos locked up in labs—but have you met real scientists? They’re always talking to people about science! Once you get them started, you can’t get scientists to shut up about their research. [Laughs] Really, I think the purpose of science is hope. Hope for a future we can understand, seize, and conquer. And ultimately that is why I love talking about science and connecting people with it.

Really, I think the purpose of science is hope. Hope for a future we can understand, seize, and conquer. And ultimately that is why I love talking about science and connecting people with it.

GF: I want to wrap up by hearing about what you’ve been up to for the past year as a White House Fellow and what you are working on next. 

MD: The White House Fellowship is a leadership fellowship where the 15 fellows learn from leaders from all different walks of life about how they led and how they were changed by it.  Besides this “educational” component—which was amazing because I got to become “siblings” with helicopter pilots, astronautical engineers, JAGs, social workers, and emergency police—fellows are also placed with a cabinet or subcabinet member for 12 months. I had the immense honor and privilege to work with the Secretary of the Navy, the Honorable Carlos Del Toro, who was also a White House Fellow two decades ago. He retired from the Navy as a commander, then worked in the private sector, and now he’s responsible for almost one million people: civilians, marines, and sailors. Witnessing how such a vast and essential organization is run was incredible. My specific portfolio was about higher education, science, technology, and workforce development. Essentially, the White House Fellowship allowed me to not only to experience the world outside the lab and understand how non-scientists think, but also to see science and education from a much broader perspective, which was transformative.                 

Now that I am back from this year in public service, I’m taking care of the projects in my lab, which I left behind for a year, and all the amazing people in my lab who were kind of orphaned for 12 months. And I am also continuing my science communication work: thanks to the Guggenheim Fellowship, I secured a book deal for a popular science book on food and genes, so stay tuned for more on this topic!   

GF: Congratulations! 

MD: Thank you! I am so excited. I honestly can’t believe it. When I first got the email from the Guggenheim, I cried and called out to my dad and husband from the terrace: “I think I just got an email that says I was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship!” It is sometimes hard to feel a sense of belonging in a profession and to find the space to be who you are, especially in academia. For me, science, communication, service, and community are so important to who I am as a scientist; they all are critical to how I think about my scholarship and its mission. So when I learned about getting the Guggenheim, especially because of my project proposal [which included the book idea], it was really the one time that I felt that my two parallel lives—which, for me, internally, were always one—were coming together externally. And that’s why I cried, beyond the honor, which is just wow. It’s the opportunity to connect science and people, to bring science, and all its hope, outside of academia and into the world, to make science part of it. Thank you so much, GF! 

    

This interview has been edited and condensed. Top image courtesy of Monica Dus. 

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