Northwestern University: Identifying the Mechanisms of Seeing Color with Jeremy Nathans, MD, PhD
A celebrated molecular neuroscientist, Jeremy Nathans, MD, PhD, is responsible for landmark discoveries that have changed our understanding of how humans see the world. He is an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Nathans’ groundbreaking insights into the molecular mechanisms of visual system development and function have led Northwestern University to name him the 2022 recipient of the Mechthild Esser Nemmers Prize in Medical Science. The $200,000 Nemmers Prize in Medical Science is awarded every two years to a physician-scientist whose research exhibits not only outstanding achievement in medical science, but also lasting significance.
“I would say I was at the right place at the right time (when he became the first to isolate and characterize opsin genes contributing to human color vision) … I think it was a problem that was ripe in the sense that the field had defined it as an interesting question and the technology then arrived. So, sort of this collision of worlds, the technology from molecular genetics and the insight from the vision research world. And I just happened to be at the place where the collision occurred.”
– Jeremy Nathans, MD, PhD
Recipient of the 2022 Mechthild Esser Nemmers Prize in Medical Science
Episode Notes
Nathans’ research into the mechanisms that allow humans to see colors led him to identify the genes that code for color-vision receptors in the light-sensing cones of the retina. This groundbreaking discovery led to an unprecedented understanding of color blindness. It also led Nathans to new insights in the development, function and survival of the retina, including diseases of the vision system as well.
Topics covered in this show:
Nathans studied chemistry and biology as an undergraduate at MIT and later became an MD-PhD student at Stanford where he worked in the laboratory of David Hogness, a very eminent molecular biologist and was profoundly influenced by Lubert Stryer, a molecular and cell biologist, and Denis Baylor, a neurobiologist. Nathans was also influenced by his father, Daniel Nathans, who was a biomedical scientist and who won a Nobel Prize in 1978 for his role in discovering the first tools for understanding and manipulating DNA.
Nathans began studying the visual system as a graduate student and proposed a novel approach to identifying the molecular basis of human color vision for this graduate thesis project. Nathans describes this time period as “the dawn of gene isolation technology.”
Nathans would go on to show that people who are red-green colorblind have variations in their red-green color detecting genes. While this was an idea that had been around for over a century, it was Nathans who was able to identify the inherited defect in the molecules that captured light.
With primate neuroscientist Jerry Jacobs, Nathans genetically engineered mice so that instead of seeing only two-color receptors as mice normally do, they were able to see three color receptors as primates do. This project strongly suggested that the primate brain is not unique in its ability to analyze color at trichromatic level, but that each mammalian brain has an inherent plasticity that will allow it to process an additional complexity of color signals.
Since starting his own lab in 1988 when he joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins Medical School, Nathans has broadened his research to include retinal diseases as well as retinal cell biology and biochemistry. Most predominantly, Nathans has investigated retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration in his lab.
Most recently the Nathans lab has been focused on a series of monogenic disorders in which the vascular development was incomplete or insufficient within the retina. They discovered that one major source of the retinal vascular disease of this kind is mutations in genes that encode a signaling pathway in which the glial cells send a signal.
As a professor, Nathans teaches one of the most popular courses on campus, a course called “Great Experiments in Biology.” He is also celebrated for his ability to inspire students, teaching them how to think creatively in the lab and how to utilize the promise of their own scientific imaginations.
In 2017, Nathans and his family sold his father’s Nobel Prize award, and the proceeds from that sale went to an endowment that supports the research of young biomedical scientists at Johns Hopkins Medical Center through the Hamilton Smith Award for Innovative Research. The award was named after one of the scientists who shared the Nobel Prize award with Nathans’ father, Hamilton Smith, an under-recognized but brilliant scientist, Nathans says.
Nathans is thrilled to more deeply engage with the Northwestern community on the occasion of the Nemmers Prize. For his Nemmers Prize lecture, Nathans will discuss vascular biology, and in particular, central nervous system vascular biology, the future of his research for the next several years.