My name is Erich Jarvis. I'm an associate professor at Duke University Medical Center.
I'm also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
I'm going to be talking to you today about why I became a scientist
and how I became a scientist.
Just to let you know, right now I run a laboratory
that roughly has anywhere from 15 to 20 persons,
depending on the semester, and we study brain pathways for vocal learning.
But that's not how I began.
I grew up in New York City, mostly in the Bronx and Queens,
and I grew up in a family that came from diverse economic backgrounds,
from being relatively poor, middle class, and we always were told to have a dream in life,
to make your life better, to do something important.
But, most of my family was into the performing arts, particularly on my mother's side.
And so, we were all dreaming to be famous artists, singers, dancers, and so forth.
And, to do this with a passion. And so, when I was a youngster in elementary school
and eventually going to high school,
I auditioned for the high school of performing arts and got to be a dance major there.
And then also was at the Joffrey Ballet School in New York City
and the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, and I was pushing along to be a serious dancer.
And I would dance 6 hours a day --
three hours at school, three hours at once of these dance schools --
and, in between, would have academic classes
like math, biology, reading, writing, and so on.
At some point, towards the end of my high school years,
I started really thinking about, "Is this really the career I want to pursue?"
And I was doing ok. For instance, my senior year, towards the end of that year,
I was asked to audition for Alvin Ailey Dance School.
I mean, the Company.
I was asking myself, "What do I really want to do in life?"
I started asking that question because my mother always said to me,
"It doesn't really matter what you do."
"What's most important that what you do, you do it well."
And, she would then add that,
"I'd like you to do something that has a positive impact on society."
And I thought, "What can I do that has a positive impact on society?"
I felt I could do that better as a scientist than I could do that as a dancer.
So, at my senior dance concert, right at the end of the dance concert,
I'm making this decision here, and I said,
"You know what, I'd like to go ahead and be a scientist."
And I didn't have any scientific background or training at all.
I had biology classes, which I really liked.
So, I applied to different colleges, got into Hunter College,
and actually had to take remedial courses
because they said I wasn't prepared enough to take the advanced academic classes.
So, I took a summer of remedial classes, and then really started
intensively studying biology and mathematics, like I was studying dance.
And the reason why I was studying biology and math
is because I felt I wasn't sure if I really liked biology better
(or, let's say, that is the understanding of how biological organisms work)
or the origins of the universe.
Those are my two major interests.
So, I decided to do both.
And I thought math would actually help me think better.
So, then, after my first year, I got into a program that helps under-represented minorities
get into scientific research.
And this was a great advantage that I discovered later offset
a disadvantage that I had that I didn't realize many other people had.
And then, I really worked with a passion in the lab.
I would sometimes spend the night in the lab,
do experiments on the weekends, on the holidays.
And, people would call up, "Where is Erich? Where is Erich? Where can we find him?"
In the lab. That's where he was.
And I fell in love with doing scientific research in the lab, like I did as a dancer.
And people often ask me, "Well how did you make that switch?"
"Aren't those two different fields very different?"
And I discovered at the time that no, they're not.
Both of them require a lot of discipline.
Both of them require a lot of hard work.
Both of them require acceptance of failure.
That is, you have do a choreographed dance over and over and over again
until you get it right, just like an experiment.
Sometimes, if you submit a paper for a publication, it gets rejected.
Sometimes, you go for an audition, you get rejected.
So, you have to learn how to accept rejection and try over again.
And, importantly, both of them require a good level of creativity.
As an artist, you need to be creative to have your art be appreciated by others,
you need to come up with something new.
Same thing for science. You need to be creative to understand how nature works.
And so, to me, dance and science was a natural merge of two different fields.
Then, when I was at Hunter College, where I did my undergraduate
scientific research and also academic training,
I decided, "What do I want to do particularly within science for my future career?"
And I decided, "You know what? I really am interested in two questions."
One is the origins of the universe, and the other is how the brain works.
And, in trying to choose between those two, I chose to study how the brain works.
Why? Because I felt it was more rooted in my dance background.
That is, more rooted in something here in the Earth.
And, as a result of that, I applied to different graduate schools,
and I got into a number of them because,
from all the hard work I did as an undergraduate student,
I was able to publish 6 papers in scientific journals,
either as first author papers or collaborative papers with others in the lab.
And that helped me become competitive
to get into some good graduate school programs.
And I was trying to decide, do I want to do an MD-PhD or a PhD
to answer this question about brain function?
And I decided on the PhD because usually the PhDs are the folks
who actually make the discoveries to understand how things work
or the cures for diseases.
So I went to Rockefeller University,
as a graduate student, and I began to study the songbird brain,
and discovered genes that are regulated in those areas
that either control the neural circuits for forming learned vocalizations,
or at least producing them.
And, to make a long story short, to skip a number of years later
to now being an associate professor at Duke University Medical Center,
teaching medical students on how the brain works,
I recently discovered with my collaborators
that the brain pathways that control vocal learning abilities
are embedded within brain areas that control motor and sequenced behavior,
including potentially learning how to dance.
And so now, I'm actually coming full circle to bringing my scientific career
and my former dance training together because those two brain circuits
seem to be related to each other.
And I hope in the future to discover what that relationship really is.
And I think the answer is going to tell us how brain pathways
for complex circuits evolved in general.
And this would be a natural, nice merging of art and science.