TT: What were you thinking? That it doesn’t work?
BWJ: It doesn’t work! So I was looking for another project. And a colleague of mine told me that the lab had mouse models of retinal degeneration that had gotten old and hadn’t been used. I looked at animal retinas, and lo and behold, it was the same thing another colleague had seen in a series of human retinas: remodeling so extensive that they no longer looked like retinas; all the lamination had been lost. So that became the basis of my doctorate.
It turned out that the retina was also this beautiful model system: this absolutely beautiful, compact representation of a dense neurological topology that defines all the primitives of how we begin to process vision. This totally appealed to me.
TT: What are you currently working on?
BWJ: The lab’s first mission is to understand the normal topology of the retina’s circuitry, and then the next is to understand how that topology breaks down in diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa, age-related macular degeneration, and glaucoma. We studied the state of the wiring after photoreceptor loss.
More recently, we have studied the early stages of changes in this degeneration, which led to the idea of using the retina as a model for central nervous system neurodegeneration, such as Alzheimer’s disease. Because if we wait until very late in the course of retinal degeneration, we see the same proteinopathies that begin to emerge in Alzheimer’s disease; we also see the same changes in protein expression.
A few studies have looked at gap junction changes in Alzheimer’s disease, and it is also one of the first biomarkers we see in retinal degeneration. So perhaps we could start using the retina as an early model to understand how Alzheimer’s disease progresses, because there is currently no good early model.
TT: Does photography influence the way you think about vision research?
BWJ: Many people think of the eyes and retina as cameras, but that is not the case. They work very, very differently. There’s a lot more nuance to how they work, and there’s a temporal component to how they work. But photography is one of the simplest tools we have for thinking about and communicating vision. At the same time, it is a useful tool, but it is also an imperfect tool for communicating a vision. And I think about it a lot.
I also think about the value I place on vision, how it shapes the way I see the world, the way I remember and the way I sort of think about the world. And so for me, photography is a constant reminder of why what we study is important.