Dr. Daniel D. Brown (formerly "Irradiatus") may be doing a second post-doctoral research job at Carnegie Mellon University at the lab of Dr. Veronica Hinman to study the evolution of developmental gene networks, and the creator of the magnificent blog Biochemical Soul where he writes about science, nature, outreach and evolution, but he's also one of the nicest biologists I've ever interviewed!

Not only did he thank me for doing the Q&A before it had even begun ("First off, I’d like to thank you so much for inviting me for this interview. It’s not often I get to talk about myself knowing that I’ve been given license to do so. I hope that your readers will find something entertaining or educational in my answers," he said) but he was also apt to answer all of my questions on marine biology even though that wasn't exactly his focus.

It was a pleasure to hear his responses!

To be honest, I made up the name “Irradiatus” shortly after high school in the nineties, having spent a couple of years studying Latin. Based on the dictionaries I had on hand, I was fairly certain that it wasn’t a real Latin word. The internet was just taking off (yes kids, we had no useful internet to speak of in my childhood) so I figured I needed a good internet handle. I hadn’t really intended any specific meaning with “Irradiatus”; I just liked how it sounded.

Later I discovered that some Latin dictionaries do list “irradiatus” as the past participle of “irradio,” which means, “to enlighten” or “enlightened.” So in a way, considering the purpose of my blog and my professional activities, it seems an appropriate handle, though it also now seems a bit more arrogant than I initially intended. 

Tell me about your background and include any background you may have in marine biology.

I grew up as a rat-tail-sporting barefoot redneck running around the pine forests of Northeastern Texas (specifically in a tiny town called Hooks). My daily pre-teen life apart from school pretty much consisted of me looking for critters alone in the woods – often trekking great distances (for a little kid anyway) through forests and over farmlands, skirting diamondback rattlers and copperheads. One of my most vivid memories from my childhood was when I came upon a flooded area of “my woods” a week or two after a big storm. The entire forest floor was covered in a couple of inches of water, which was itself filled with gloopy, slimy bunches of frog eggs. Each gelatinous mass was about the size of a softball, and I distinctly remember just sitting their feeling the goo between my fingers as tiny tadpole tails swirled within each isolated egg. I was completely mesmerized. I’m almost certain that I was born a biologist – but that moment in the forest of frog embryos in particular pretty much sealed the deal for me.

I grew out of my redneckdom not long after, though I certainly retained my country boy attitude. Since those days in the Texas woods my biological interests have varied widely. I spent time in my undergrad training (at an amazing liberal arts college called “Hendrix College” in Arkansas) working in the field of ecology, radio-tracking timber rattlesnakes in the Ozark Mountains. In a slightly more sophisticated echo of my days playing with frog eggs, I moved to the University of North Carolina where I worked for many years trying to figure out how genes tell a growing frog embryo how to make a heart (my Ph.D. work). After getting my doctorate, I stayed in the field of developmental biology and spent a few years studying brain development in mice. 

I have now gone one step deeper into the realm of biology, moving into the field so cool it gets its own nickname: “evodevo.” For the non-scientists out there, that’s “evolutionary developmental biology.” In my current work, I study not only how organisms develop, but also how the genetic programs that control development evolve at the molecular level. And not only do I get to work on such a fascinating subject, but I get to do so using those wacky creatures called “echinoderms” (starfish, sea urchins, and their kin).

According to the opinion you’ve formulated on the blog in the past, how is marine life connected to the theory of evolution.

This thing we call life - with its varied types of cells, some living alone, some forming colonies, and others forming large complex creatures with the ability to analyze their own existence – arose as a marine organism. Not only did the common ancestor of every organism on the planet arise in the ancient ocean (or perhaps in brackish lakes as one recent study suggested), but the evolution of most major animal body forms all occurred in the ocean as well. Think about the myriad forms of life: the invertebrate wormy forms, the segmented arthropod forms ranging from lobsters to insects to spiders, the molluscan forms ranging from clams to octopuses, the echinoderm forms of sea urchins, starfish, and sea cucumbers, and the chordate forms we’re most familiar with from sea squirts to the various fishes to all manner of land vertebrates. These are only a tiny sampling, and all of these forms got their beginnings in the oceans. In fact, most of the history of evolution on Earth occurred in the oceans. In a sense, marine life is evolution.

Would you consider yourself a marine conservationist? Have you ever owned an aquarium? Do you think an aquarium owner can also be a marine conservationist.

This is a tougher question for me. I spent most of my scholastic life (high school and college) in the landlocked state of Arkansas. As such, I never really had much exposure to the ocean, and thus didn’t really know much about marine life.

That being said, I absolutely consider myself a marine conservationist. However, to a degree I feel that by calling myself such, I do a disservice to the “real” marine conservationists who spend much of their time and efforts trying to promote conservation of marine ecosystems and their constituents. I know much less than I should about marine conservation issues, and most of what I do I know I have learned from the folks over at Southern Fried Science, Deep-Sea News, and The Oyster’s Garter

As to the second part of your question, I can honestly say that one of the things I have most wanted in my life and never had the wherewithal to actually attain is a saltwater aquarium. I’ve yet to be in a stable enough position where I’ve felt I could give an aquarium the care I would necessarily have to devote to it. That being said, I am now fortunate enough that in my current research I get to stare into aquaria filled with beautiful sea stars and sea urchins every day.

As a scientist, one thing I’ve learned is that one should never tout vague knowledge of topics outside one’s field of expertise, especially when the public might perceive that vague knowledge as actual expertise. I do not have the knowledge or data to back up my opinion on the ecological soundness of owning an aquarium. That being said, my gut instinct, based on only a little bit of knowledge is that anyone with sufficient willingness to learn the most ecologically friendly aquarium species and practices can do so in a marine conservation-friendly manner. I’m particularly fond of aquaria in public places in general, as I believe that the more exposure people have to the marine world, the more they respect it. However, I defer to actual marine scientists on whether this is an opinion I should continue to hold. As I’ve just demonstrated, this is obviously a subject that even I should make myself much more knowledgeable on.

You go beach combing quite often.  What are you looking for in the ocean debris and what do your finds tell you about the marine world and living organisms of the past?

What do I look for? Well, to be honest I don’t look for anything. That is to say, I simply let the ocean show me whatever it wants. That probably sounds a bit flaky but it’s true (minus the figurative anthropomorphism). My blood beats science pure and simple. There is very little I could see on any given beach-combing excursion that would not fascinate me. Dead fish bones, fossil shark teeth, seashells, jellyfish, sea stars – I want to see it all every time. I am an avid amateur fossil collector, so I’m always particularly interested in fossilized shark teeth and bones. 

What do my finds tell me? Now this is my favorite question. Every fish vertebrae, every scurrying ghost crab, every nugget of coal eroded from ocean shelves and washed ashore – they all tell me one thing: that this reality is more fascinating, more beautiful, more contingent, more logical, and more simultaneously inextricable and understandable than humankind can ever dream. They all also remind me that life is very old – and we are here witnessing only an infinitesimal snapshot of what life can be and the beauty it can hold.

That’s usually about the point at which I trip over rubber tire or cut myself on a broken bottle and rethink those last thoughts. s

While I love beachcombing for life from the present and past, I get even more enjoyment in finding marine organisms far from the oceans, such as in the layers of limestone around my current home of hilly Pittsburgh, where I’ve found 300 million year old corals, brachiopods, and trilobites. What does it tell me when I find a fossilized colonial crinoid (an ancient echinoderm related to sea urchins and sea stars) eroding from a rock in landlocked Western Pennsylvania? Mostly these long dead critters paint for me a picture of a world that is both alien and familiar. It’s a world very different from the one in which I stand, but it is one that existed in the same spot where I stand – a world to which I owe my own existence.

Lately you’ve been posting a lot on shark teeth. What do you hope these teeth tell you?

I’ve been a fossil hunter/collector since I was a small child. I still have my first fossil – an extinct ocean brachiopod I found digging in the dirt in the Ozark Mountains. However, it wasn’t until recently that I discovered that North Carolina has some wonderful fossil shark tooth sites. I knew I would soon be leaving the state for a new job, so I couldn’t leave without taking a few trips to Greeneville and Aurora, which is where the teeth can be found by the thousands. This is the reason for the string of posts on shark teeth.

The fossils I’ve found don’t really tell me one thing in particular. I would be lying if I did not admit that the primary reason I collect fossils such as shark teeth is for simple pleasure. It’s a hobby in which I find much enjoyment in the same way that any collector finds satisfaction from his or her hobby. However, I aspire to becoming a full-time professor, and I always consider myself a teacher in general – so a secondary motivation is that my fossil collection is a superb teaching tool, both in the classroom and in the real world. As some people know, I often carry a few fossil shark teeth in my pocket on the off chance that I will meet a kid (or adult) with a mind perceptive to finding fascination in these twenty million year old remains of carnivorous beasts. 

Upon being handed a multi-million year old shark’s tooth, sometimes people will react with a “um…that’s …er…interesting,” meaning that they think the exact opposite. Such is life. However, sometimes the reaction is utter bewilderment and amazement. Usually the reaction is even more dramatic in perceptive adults – as adults tend to have a much better understanding of what “millions of years” actually means. I have met so many people who have never really considered the nature of biological existence or evolution – at least not while holding such a relic in their hand, imagining the creature as it once existed. I know of several people that now carry one of my fossil shark teeth in their wallet – and every time they rediscover it as they dig for a quarter, they rediscover that fascination of the natural world. More recently, I have used some of my fossils (inner ear bones of a couple of whales and several dolphins) in a guest lecture in an Evolution class at Carnegie Mellon University.

In essence, the fossil shark teeth are not so much about what they can tell me, but what I can tell others with them.

In one of your past posts, you became a “self-proclaimed” honorary marine biologist.  What was the cause?

As mentioned above, I recently began a second post-doctoral research job at Carnegie Mellon University to study the evolution of developmental gene networks in Dr. Veronica Hinman’s lab. In this work, our model organisms are the brainless, yet fascinating marine creatures known as echinoderms. This work involves looking at the gene networks that control development of several echinoderms – namely, the sea urchin, sea star, and sea cucumber. The purpose of the research is not to study marine life per se, but to study evolution and development in the context of marine organisms. Thus, I called myself an “honorary marine biologist.” Admittedly, I did this partly to endear myself to what I consider the “cool kids crowd” of science bloggers, the marine bloggers at Southern Fried Science, Deep-Sea News, The Oyster’s Garter, Cephalopodcast, Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets, The Echinoblog, Observations of a Nerd, Blogfish, and Oh, For the Love of Science!. Those folks are all rad!

Tell us in a few short sentences why you call your blog Biochemical Soul.

In short, I wanted a blog title that at once represents the beauty of human thought and scientific understanding as well as the inherently natural and physical nature of our existence.

I do not personally believe in an immortal soul or any actual entity we might call a “soul.” For me, my usage of the word is best described by Lisa Simpson (the yellow animated one): “Whether or not the soul is physically real…it’s the symbol of everything fine inside us.”

To quote myself, “this blog represents a large part of my ‘soul,’ with ‘soul’ simply being defined as the essence of ‘me,’ emergent from my biochemistry and physiology – no supernatural connotations intended. I just thought it was a nice, pithy title…”

A full explanation of the origins of my blog title can be found here.

What are your future plans in biology and marine biology?

Well the immediate future will involve me isolating a number of genes from sea stars and sea cucumbers, followed by work to figure out how these genes fit in the networks that drive the development of these organisms from single-celled embryos. The next step will then be to compare the networks between these organism (which evolved from common ancestors in the realm of 500 million years ago), to identify specific genetic changes that might have occurred in their evolution and how these gene networks evolve in general. 

I’d like to note at this point that my blog has been on a bit of a hiatus since this summer, owing to the fact that this is a very new research program for me. Too many things to learn and do in too little time, as well as being involved in an undergraduate evodevo course, have left me with little time to blog. I am hopeful this will change as I get up to speed with these spiny creatures.

The future beyond these current plans is anyone’s guess. So far, my life - like much of evolutionary history - has been contingent on myriad happenstance events. I don’t foresee that changing and I’d have it no other way.

Image (top right): Bat Star Asterina miniata

Image (second right): Fossil Shark Teeth from Biochemical Soul

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