As a child, Kay Tye was immersed in a life of science. “I grew up in my mom’s lab,” she says. At the age of five or six, she earned 25 cents a box for “restocking” bulk-ordered pipette tips into boxes for sterilization as her mother, an acclaimed biochemist at Cornell University, probed the genetics of yeast. (Tye’s father is a theoretical physicist known for his work on cosmic inflation and superstring theory.)
Today, Tye runs her own neuroscience lab at MIT. Under large black lights reminiscent of a fashion shoot, she and her team at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory can observe how mice behave when particular brain circuits are turned on or off. Nearby, they can record the mice’s neural activity as the animals move toward a particular stimulus, like sugar water, or away, if they’re crossing a floor that delivers mild electric shocks. Elsewhere, they create brain slices to test in vitro, since these samples retain their physiological activity, even outside the body, for up to eight hours. Original Article »