Bowdoin Science Journal

lobsters

Yasemin Altug in the Spotlight

by

“I am delirious in lab. You have to be to have fun” – Yasemin Altug

When she was 12 years old, Yasemin cared little for popular book series like Percy Jackson or Harry Potter. Instead, she read Beyin Nasıl Çalışır? – How Does the Brain Work? in Turkish – before going to sleep. At that age, her mom knew she was a “special child”. As the years passed, her interest in neuroscience only grew. Now, Yasemin is an undergraduate senior researcher in Bowdoin College’s Powell lab where she studies the lobster cardiac nervous system (hence the red lab coat).

On a late September morning, Yasemin invited me into the lab. As she gathered ice to numb the lobster, she explained that small fluctuations in temperature can disrupt crucial functions mediated by the lobster’s nervous system, like breathing and pumping blood. Whereas our warm-blooded bodies can regulate our body temperature, cold-blooded creatures, like lobsters, are at the whim of their environments.

In the Gulf of Maine, that environment is heating up as a result of global warming and shifting currents. To understand how the lobster’s cardiac nervous system responds, Yasemin investigates how, or even if a specific heart-modulating hormone is involved in warming compensation. To do so, she measures the lobster’s heartbeat at various temperatures in the presence and absence of the hormone. When cardiac neurons are active, they leave behind identifiable signatures on the heartbeat force signal. Yasemin can use these signatures to derive whether the hormone is affecting activity in specific cardiac neurons, and if warming conditions change those hormone-neuron interactions. She can then use that information to construct a more complete picture of ocean warming effects on lobsters.

To conduct her experiments, Yasemin has to pay the cost of a living organism as she collects the lobster from its tank, numbs it, dissects it, and cannulates its heart. This meticulous work comes with feelings of discomfort and guilt. To overcome those feelings, she focuses on the impact her studies might have on the lives of people living in Maine. In this state, a string of lobster-dependent communities lines the coast. Lobsters hold ecological, cultural, and economic value to these communities. After all, tourists do not come to Maine for its chicken sandwiches. Therefore, warming oceans pose a threat not only to Maine’s coastal ecosystem, but also its culture and to people’s livelihoods. The relevance of her research in all these contexts makes it worth the effort.

 

 

“I have to do what I have to do for the net positive outcomes of research. I think this is more important than my discomfort.”

 

 

Beyond the moral dilemma of working with living creatures, Yasemin also shared that it has been particularly difficult to navigate academia in her second language. On top of that, she comes from a place where some people – especially women – are not always given opportunities to enter STEM fields. During her time in classes at Bowdoin, she saw other students express themselves fluently, get better grades, and achieve better dissections in lab. It triggered her imposter syndrome. But the curiosity and drive of that little girl who used to read Beyin Nasıl Çalışır? before bed never left her. Yasemin realized that the skills often socially expected of women – like being a good listener, working with people, and problem solving – are the most important skills in the lab. Her message to other women in STEM is to not count themselves out:

“Being a good scientist is not about understanding the concepts with ease, it’s not about being perfect, it’s about being able to deal with mishaps… because scientists don’t care if you know how to hold a pipet, they care if you can learn how to hold a pipet.”