WISENET Journal 35, July 1994, pp. 14-15.
Southern Cross University. A long and winding road has led me to the portals of academia and a life far different from any I had ever imagined. Accidental circumstance, rather than any grand plan of an organised career pathway, has thrust me into a lecturing position and postgraduate research at the tail-end of my mothering career.
I graduated from the University of NSW in the early seventies with a Science degree and a newborn baby boy. That little baby, who now has two sisters and a brother, is back at the same university doing a Science degree of his own. He is soon to be followed by a sister just as soon as she gets her HSC.
Being a mother changes you and it has been the focus of my life. Although I have had to mother against great odds, the feeling of deep fulfilment and personal satisfaction I have gained is primal and immeasurable. My children laughingly say that I am an embodiment of the sticker on the cupboard door which reads "Goddess at the Kitchen Sink".
A few years ago (a dusty part of resumé history), I was fortunate to get a job to support my family by tutoring Anatomy and Physiology at the local CAE in Lismore. I thoroughly enjoy teaching and eventually earned the nickname from some of my students of "the goddess of Physiology". When the CAE became a university, I succumbed, albeit reluctantly, to subtle pressure to upgrade ("We may not be able to employ you if you don't have a Master's") as I fall into that vast group of Level A Lecturers who are not permanently employed.
A false start with a male colleague prompted me to do a Master's qualifying with Professor Lesley Rogers who is head of the Physiology Department at UNE Armidale. After completing the qualifying requirements last June with an Honours equivalent of 2.1, I am now finishing a Master's of Science and planning a PhD. Apart from the enormous difficulties of doing postgraduate research externally and part-time (on top of a full-time job and the family), my work with Lesley is inspiring and has blossomed into a quest to explore the interface of the mind and body.
Lesley leads the Brain and Behaviour group, a collection of postgraduate students doing research in areas around her passion in life which is asymmetry in the brain. As a supervisor, Lesley is exacting and expects nothing less than the best from her students but she is more than generous with her time and maintains continuous contact with everyone individually and as a group. Most of us are using chickens as a model but Lesley's interests extend far beyond avian brains and one young woman in the group is studying lateralisation of behaviour in a thriving marmoset colony.
Numerous studies by Lesley and others have shown that the two hemispheres of the chicken brain do not function equally. This left-right difference in brain function, known as lateralisation, was first revealed by injecting low doses of glutamate into the brains of two day old chicks. A retardation of visually guided behaviours is produced by treating the left hemisphere (or both), but not the right alone.
Underlying this functional lateralisation is a light-induced structural asymmetry in the thalarnofugal projections, one of the two main visual pathways which ascends from the thalamus to the visual Wulst in the forebrain. Light experience before hatching establishes more projections from the left thalamus (receiving input from the right eye) to the right WuIst. Correspondingly, there is a lesser number of projections from the right thalamus to the left Wuist due to the left eye being blocked or occluded by the embryo when it is in the shell.
I have been studying the effect of the low dose of glutamate on the development of the structure of the thalarnofugal projections which are asymmetrical. The results showed the usual direction of asymmetry in the control chicks, but interestingly, the glutamate-treated chicks showed a loss of asymmetry. Glutamate, the main neurotransmitter of the visual pathway, is known to be neurotoxic in high extracellular doses but low doses have been found to stimulate the growth of neurons and are said to be neurotrophic. Future work will investigate the possibility that random growth of neurons in the less developed pathway underlies the effect of low doses of glutamate on brain structure and function in these glutamate treated chicks.
I presented my work as a poster at the Australian Neuroscience Society conference at Sydney University in early February. Being a latecomer to an academic career, this was the first conference I had ever attended. I worked on my poster for weeks. A craft class I had attended with my younger daughter gave me the idea to construct a 3-dimensional representation of a sectioned chicken brain. At first I had misgivings, but this "creation" was able to show the entire technique and became the feature of the poster. For me, the poster represented a blending of female creativity with the rigour of the scientific method. I was delighted and honoured to receive a student poster prize from over 90 entrants. This all goes to show that it is never too late to begin and that female attributes are an integral part of science.