Joseph Neale

Paduano Distinguished Professor of Biology
Age: 70
Hometown: Washington, D.C.
Education: B.S. Georgetown University, Biology; Ph.D. Georgetown University, Biology
Area of research: Neurochemistry
Time at Georgetown: 37 years as faculty; 4 years as undergraduate; born in Georgetown Hospital
Courses Taught: “First-year Seminar in Biology,” “Neurobiology,” “Neurodisorders”

What led you to concentrate in brain chemistry?
What led me to study brain chemistry was a fascination with the fact that your mind is simply a vast number of cells communicating chemically with each other in an extraordinarily dynamic manner. Brain is mind. 

When I was in graduate school, I was not predisposed to go into neurochemistry. But I read an article in Scientific American and … it was about the chemistry of learning and memory. And I said, that’s what I want to do. That’s the reason I entered the field, that one paper … by Bernard Agranoff. I started research in that area as a grad student. I contacted him, he came to visit and he offered me a postdoctoral position as a research biochemist at the University of Michigan when I finished my degree and that’s where I went. 

What is the greatest challenge in your field?
Designing experiments that rigorously explain how the nervous system develops and functions.

What is the most fascinating question in your field and in your research?
In my field of research, what is the basis, in terms of neurochemistry, for learning and memory? I started out in research exploring exactly that question; my research ultimately led me to the discovery of a previously unrecognized neurotransmitter abbreviated NAAG. We, and others, discovered that it’s the third most prevalent transmitter in the human nervous system. What our lab specifically did was to develop drugs to make this transmitter work better and demonstrate the efficacy of those drugs in animal models of significant clinical disorders including schizophrenia, traumatic brain injury and inflammatory pain.

What do you think the greatest challenge in teaching is?
Inspiring your students — if you can’t inspire your students, you should get out of teaching. That’s a very bold and perhaps too strident a statement, but that’s what I believe. The biggest challenge in balancing teaching and research is that to be really great at either of those, you have to give them your heart and your soul. And since we only have one heart and one soul, and some limited number of hours a week, one needs to find the most efficient way of doing those things. But, students can’t be sacrificed on the altar of efficiency. You have to deal with students one-on-one a lot of the time. You have to be able to take a large class — I taught Foundations 103 for years — and literally inspire every student in that class every time you stand in front of them. I would emphasize “try,” because one never succeeds in doing that in the absolute sense.

What would be your ideal course to teach?
Foundations 103. It’s a course that I taught and I think it’s the most fun and exciting course to teach because you can take students who are not as knowledgeable as they might be about science and you can create a trajectory for them. And you have the luxury of exploring with them some of the most fascinating elements of many kinds of biology, whether it’s the structure of proteins, whether it’s the nature of the gene, whether it’s how we go from a cellular biology to an emergent property of a protein or tissue, and how we go from nerve cells to function. 

Has Georgetown’s Jesuit identity affected how you teach?
I think the Jesuit identity has an incredibly positive effect on how I teach, not in the sense that I teach biology in any way which tries to conform with Catholicism, because I do not. I think Georgetown’s strength derives from the fact that Jesuits created this place and have stayed committed to this place as an undergraduate university. And so while we have a very prominent law school and medical school, the undergraduate education is the strength of the place and the Jesuits have never lost sight of that fact. … The other element where the Jesuit influence has been extremely positive is that this is a place where you are … encouraged to think and speak and teach about values and issues in any class. And biology involves a lot of those issues. There’s no heavy hand to say you should teach biology a certain way, or that there are certain things you should or shouldn’t say. That leaves faculty a lot of room to stimulate students to think deeply about important issues, whether it’s in history or English or biology. So those are two really serious impacts of the Jesuit nature of this institution. I think that a side issue, but one that, to me, is very important, is that Georgetown’s Catholicism does not in any way lead to proselytization. The spirit of a Georgetown education is there, the spirit of working for others and these kinds of values. But this isn’t Catholicism. You find the same values in many other religious movements. This distinguishes Georgetown from many other Jesuit and Catholic institutions; we’re not Notre Dame, we’re not Catholic University. There’s no dogma, and that’s purely Jesuit and uniquely Georgetown. 

Do you have any advice for Georgetown students?
I’d like students to think about serendipity. Because, I ended up as an undergraduate at Georgetown, as a scientist second and as a faculty member third all because of chance. I was admitted to Georgetown College — I only realized this years after I graduated — because my aunt was a nurse here and she was on a bowling team with a Jesuit on the admissions committee. And the reason I believe that is because I was woefully unprepared when I got here compared to the other students. I would never have started research except that professor Chapman, who’s still in our department as an Emeritus faculty member, invited me to do work in his laboratory as a senior in college. I was never even thinking about doing research for a career. And right there, I decided I was going to become a research scientist. Reading that article in Scientific American, I could have missed that article and I might not have become a neurochemist. So, from a student’s perspective as you’re reading THE HOYA, recognize that serendipity will have a lot to do with what happens in your life and it’s just being prepared for and open to chance. 

Interview by Sheena Karkal