George Augustine searches for the deep sea treasures of the mind
By Nicole Lim, Senior Assistant Director, Communications & External Relations
From framed journal covers and original artwork to black and white photos from decades ago, Professor George Augustine’s office is a time capsule of his life and achievements. He points to a brightly coloured illustration of a squid gliding close to the seabed, saying, “This is really a story about squid.”
While these cephalopods yielded many career defining opportunities, being in the right place at the right time is another thread that runs throughout the life of LKCMedicine’s Professor of Neuroscience & Mental Health.
But it was a set of the most tragic circumstances that set him on this path. Aged just 16, he was considering his choice of university, when a house fire devastated the family of six. The fire claimed the lives of his mother and youngest brother. “I wanted to stay close to home to help keep the family together,” said Prof Augustine, so he enrolled at the local state university, the University of Maryland in Baltimore.
At university, the precocious teenager picked biology, because he thought maths “was too easy”. And it was a chance decision to sign up for a course on the physiology of excitable cells (muscles and neurons) that proved decisive. He realised that in physiology “we could get numbers”, reuniting him with his first love of maths.
Woods Hole: his scientific home Professor George Augustine used to bring members of his labs to Woods Hole, his scientific home. His first trip to the research institute was as a 19-year-old. The long corridors lined with offices of the great and good in neuroscience left a deep impression on the teenager, and he returned every year, except for one, for the next 43 years. “Woods Hole provided many opportunities for learning and has allowed me to create a global network of contacts,” said Prof Augustine. Maintaining a lab on the East Coast had the additional benefit of enabling him to continue his work on squid beyond the winter months. |
With the PhD workload not fulfilling enough, Prof Augustine got involved in a side project with colleagues at Woods Hole in Massachusetts and later at Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory in Long Island, studying the neural regulation of horse-shoe crabs.
“I got more papers published from this side project than my PhD,” said Prof Augustine.
After his PhD, Prof Augustine secured a postdoctoral position at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), then the epicentre of neuroscience. Working under distinguished neuroscientist Professor Roger Eckert, he planned to continue his work on the crab’s giant synapse, which is large enough for researchers to see both ends – the presynaptic inputs and the postsynaptic outputs.
But luck intervened. Professor Francisco Bezanilla, a renowned neuroscientist then also at UCLA, suggested he switch from crab to squid.
”Working on squid definitely turned out to be one of the best decisions of my career,” said Prof Augustine.
Hunting for squid
Off the Californian coast lies the arid oasis of Catalina Island, where shoals of giant squid gather during the winter months. These squid are famous for their extremely large neurons. To harvest them, researchers take a small boat out in the pre-dawn hours.
“We would shine a light over the water and within a few minutes, we had millions of squid swarming into the light,” said Prof Augustine.
Working with squid, especially if he went out fishing for them himself, meant long days as it was difficult to keep them alive in captivity. So Prof Augustine did most of his work on the island’s sleepy marine biology lab.
Once the brain was removed, he would have at most a day to study the intricate communication going on between the two terminals of the synapse.
“The giant synapse is a gold mine. Working with squid gave me the tools to become an independent faculty member,” said Prof Augustine, who some two years later secured one of only four neuroscience faculty positions available in the entire US.
Falling in love over squid
As a young independent investigator working at the University of Southern California, he continued to work with Catalina’s squid, focusing on calcium channels. With his expertise, Prof Augustine was tapped by Prof Bezanilla to show the latter’s student the ropes.
The two fell in love, got married and moved to Germany as she secured a two-year stint at the Max Planck Institute. Prof Augustine seized this opportunity and joined the group of Professor Erwin Neher, who shared the 1991 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Professor Bert Sakmann for the patch clamp technique.
After a productive seven-year spell, Prof Augustine was lured to the East Coast to join the nascent neurobiology department at Duke in North Carolina. The move was a calculated risk that paid off as he spent the next two decades at Duke, rising rapidly through the ranks to become the chaired GB Geller Professor of Neurobiology.
While in Germany, he learnt about applying patch-clamping to brain slices. Now at Duke, Prof Augustine moved from squid to mice, changing focus from single cell to whole circuits to study function, addressing questions about the synaptic mechanisms of learning and memory formation.
Heading East
When Duke joined forces with the National University of Singapore in the early 2000s, Prof Augustine saw another opportunity to be involved in something new.
“Optogenetics just hit the scene, and we had these various transgenic mice which expressed channelrhodopsin in specific neurons, and moving to Singapore allowed us to charge ahead with this work,” he said. This started two years of monthly global commuting.
When he was approached by the Korean government to set up a new research programme in neuroscience, the then Dean at Duke gave him an ultimatum: it’s either us or Korea.
“I was very angry at the time, but with hindsight it probably saved my life,” said Prof Augustine, who chose to close his lab in North Carolina.
Five years later, he was persuaded by LKCMedicine’s founding dean to join the then new medical school team. “He had an inspiring vision for what LKCMedicine could become,” said Prof Augustine, who joined the School as one of its pioneer faculty members, embarking once again on a new endeavour.
Among the many successes of a career spent at the cutting-edge of neuroscience are also disappointments. For example, the illustration of the giant squid (left) had been intended for the front cover of the journal Neuron, but due to a last minute editorial decision, a black and white artwork was used instead.
Looking back, Prof Augustine feels that one of his biggest challenges was self-doubt. “At times, when I got too far ahead of everybody else, I would hold back,” he said.
Now as he is about to embark on the next chapter of his career, he hopes to be a unifying force – bringing together the neuroscience community to tackle what happens in the brain during dementia.
“We have an idea of the starting point, which is usually a faulty gene, and how it presents, but we don’t know what goes on in between. That’s what we want to find out,” said Prof Augustine.
“And by bringing everyone together, I hope we can focus on the forest and not just individual trees.”
