Developmental Biology – Can You Dig It? An Interview with Neil Shubin
10/22/2024
The Society for Developmental Biology (SDB) recognized Neil Shubin with the 2024 Viktor Hamburger Outstanding Educator Prize. Shubin is currently a Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, and the award is in recognition of his outstanding and innovative contributions to learning.
A visit to the Shubin Lab is like discovering a missing link between scientific disciplines. Inside of a molecular biology laboratory, researchers experiment with embryos from sharks, paddlefish and more, while auxiliary rooms hold the fossils of ancient vertebrate animals. Down the hall in a conference room, a whiteboard covered in notes left behind by a geneticist sits directly across from maps of future paleontological dig sites.
“What unites everyone in the lab is a common set of questions. How do body plans evolve? How do new organs come about?” said Shubin. After asking those unifying questions, disparate fields become fluid.
Shubin’s career as an educator has brought many people into the fold of developmental biology research. He has advised trainees from fields including paleontology and engineering, taught undergraduate classes for non-biology majors, and engaged the public through books and documentaries. However, he considers himself to be a latecomer to developmental biology.
As an undergraduate volunteering in the American Museum of Natural History, Shubin fell in love with paleontology. He was fascinated with field methods that could predict where to find geological clues that could shed light on ancient events. Despite this primary focus on fossils, Stephen Jay Gould’s book Ontogeny and Phylogeny introduced him to the idea that clues to the planet’s history might also be buried within the bodies of living animals.
During Shubin’s first year of graduate school, his newfound interests led him to enroll in an embryology class alongside his studies in paleontology. “Here I was, learning to design expeditions around the world to see great transitions in the history of life. But in an embryo, under the microscope in front of me, I could see great transitions in life,” said Shubin.
While Shubin was working on his graduate thesis, biologists were just beginning to understand the genetic basis of evolution. Labs around the world were finding highly conserved elements in the DNA of flies, frogs, worms and even humans that played critical roles in establishing the body plan during embryonic development. The Hox genes, and the tools that researchers used to characterize their functions, opened Shubin’s eyes to the power of molecular biology for studying the evolutionary history of life on Earth.
“I realized that… I better learn [molecular biology] because that’s really going to be the ticket to get to the answers I was looking for with embryology and fossils,” said Shubin.
Your Inner Fish
While Shubin added molecular biology and embryology techniques to his toolkit, he always intended to merge those fields with paleontology. After landing a faculty position, first at the University of Pennsylvania and later at the University of Chicago, he worked with Ted Daeschler to plan expeditions to the remote reaches of northern Canada.
Shubin and Daeschler drew from their expertise in geology and evolution to predict that Ellesmere Island in Nunavut territory may contain fossilized evidence of one of the great transitions in the history of life. Exposed rock in the region formed 375 million years ago, older than the oldest limbed fossils but still younger than many finned fossils. By exploring this region, they hoped to find evidence of a body plan that bridged the gap from life in the water to life on land.
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Over the course of four fossil-hunting expeditions spanning six summers, Shubin kept up his habit of bringing the public into his research. When his team finally made their breakthrough discovery in 2004, uncovering a fossil representing an intermediate body plan between fish and amphibians, Shubin felt a debt to the local community.
“One of the communities we really wanted to reach out to most in all the press action was the local community, the Indigenous population. They supported our work, some of them joined our work, and it didn’t seem appropriate to have all these educational materials and websites just in English,” said Shubin.
Before publishing their findings, Shubin’s team prepared educational materials that were translated into Inuktitut, one of the official languages of Nunavut. They sent these materials, along with casts of the fossils to schools in the territory. And, in collaboration with local leaders, they named the animal Tiktaalik, which means “large freshwater fish” in Inuktitut.
Back in Chicago, Shubin began serving as the Provost for the Field Museum. “I was communicating the great stories of comparative anatomy and developmental biology to diverse audiences,” said Shubin. These audiences seemed to be hooked by the idea that our bodies serve as the best evidence for evolution, so he set out to turn this idea into a popular science book.
“Teaching people their own history, both in evolution and in development, I think is a very powerful thing,” said Shubin.
Shubin released his book Your Inner Fish in 2009 to critical acclaim. The book became a national bestseller, won a Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, was recognized by the National Academy of Sciences as the best book of the year, and even earned Shubin an appearance on The Colbert Report. Not long after the book appeared in print, Shubin worked with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to turn the book into a mini-series that aired on PBS.
Your Inner Fish tells stories of discovery, including his own insights as a fish paleontologist teaching a human anatomy lab and his expeditions that uncovered Tiktaalik, while also covering “the greatest hits” of developmental biology history. Throughout the book and documentary, Shubin excels at conveying to his audience the profound similarities between different life forms that he had come to appreciate over his career.
“The thing that I absolutely love, whether it’s through fossils or development and DNA, is that we are deeply connected to the rest of life on this planet. And if there’s one thing you learn by studying development, it’s the power of those connections,” said Shubin.
The Beginner’s Mind
Beyond the bookshelf and television screen, the content of Your Inner Fish now lives on in the lecture halls of UChicago where Shubin teaches a related course to non-biology majors. Facing an audience with little prerequisite knowledge of developmental biology forces him to return to first principles and embrace what he refers to as “the beginner’s mind.”
“When you’re a beginner, you have a certain level of childlike wonder and enthusiasm, which you can lose. And communicating like that in class and in the general public really gives me that beginner’s mind again,” said Shubin.
Shubin also credits the fresh look at familiar content that he gets through teaching and outreach with impacting his research. Communicating with the public has given him a greater appreciation for the different backgrounds of formally trained scientists who attend his talks or read papers he wrote.
While numerous awards have recognized Shubin’s public outreach, the recognition by SDB with the Viktor Hamburger Outstanding Educator Award is a sign that his work is just as respected within the field of developmental biology. For Shubin, this recognition by leaders in the field is deeply affirming.
“I’ve always seen myself as a paleontologist who sort of did dev-bio on the side, and then dev-bio became more and more a part of my life,” said Shubin. “[Winning the prize] is a big deal because I shifted into the field, and for a long time I felt like an outsider… I was really out of my comfort zone.”
Finding success outside of his comfort zone is one of many themes of Shubin’s career. Exploring remote areas of the world led to his breakthrough fossil discoveries. His experience as a fish paleontologist teaching students how to dissect a human cadaver served as a throughline for his first book. We should not be surprised that his success as an educator is grounded in the experience of being a beginner, as someone seeing the wonders of developmental biology for the first time.
Last Updated 10/22/2024
