A neuroscientist's view

One of the founders of neuroscience in Australia, Professor Marcello Costa, reflects on a distinguished career as a research scientist, teacher, musician and philosopher.

Australian Life Scientist: What inspired you to become a scientist?

Professor Marcello Costa: I’ve really liked science since I was a boy. I migrated to Argentina with my family in 1949 after the Second World War and lived there for 11 years. I was really interested in the natural world and apart from playing soccer on the street I looked at bugs under the microscope. I even sold my bicycle to buy a microscope, which I still have.

When I went back to Italy in 1960 I decided to do medicine. I was determined to become a scientist, really, and maintain my interest in human beings, so I had to go through medicine.

ALS: Was it challenging moving from South America back to university in Europe?

MC: When I returned to Italy to do medicine I was not very impressed with the slightly old-fashioned system of Italian universities, which was not surprising. In Argentina I led a life of freedom. It was hard to get used to the city of Turin, which was very civilised but very conservative. I found that pretty hard going.

But I was given enough chances and I was rebellious enough to make the best of it. I did live a very interesting decade in Italy in the 1960s.

I was involved in a lot of activities as a medical student - music, climbing, politics. I entered into student politics and became one of the leaders of a student movement in northern Italy at the time.

I was already working in a lab by the time I finished medicine. I chose anatomy as a base for my studies, not because I really wanted to do anatomy but because it was the only place where they studied the nervous system.

I was lucky because it was the laboratory that had generated three Nobel prize winners, although they got the Nobel prizes when they left Italy, mostly to escape the fascism in the late 1930s. In a way my studies were surrounded by the ghosts of these people who had left - perhaps this is the reason I also left.

ALS: What inspired you to move to Australia?

MC: In those years science in Italy was still under the heavy burden of powerful figures in the university - it wasn’t a very open system. I was in anatomy but I really wanted to do physiology. My professor was not very keen for me to work with people in other departments or even other universities. But I did and discovered that is possible to become multidisciplinary.

Also, the main second language of Turin is French. Everybody spoke French and went to meetings of the Academy of Anatomists in France. I realised English was the universal language of science, so I considered to move, first to England and then to Australia.

I met Geoff Burnstock in Venice in 1969. He was a young Professor of Zoology in Melbourne at the time and is now one of the dons of the autonomic nervous system in the world. He offered me an 18-month postdoctoral fellowship to work in his lab. I asked my girlfriend, Daniela, whether she would marry and go to Australia and we did.

We came to Melbourne as migrants in 1970 and I did not expect to stay very long. But we stayed another year and then returned again in 1974.

ALS: Were you involved in founding the Flinders Medical School?

MC: Yes, I was a foundation lecturer and probably one of the youngest members of the school at the time.

When I went back to Melbourne in 1974 I met Laurie Griffen, a dynamic young Professor of Physiology from Flinders University who was looking for young foundation lecturers. I joined Laurie’s group in Adelaide and started teaching in little apartments because the medical school at Flinders University had not been built yet.

The medical school was quite modern in the sense that it abolished the distinction between the various research disciplines. Although we were in anatomy or physiology or biochemistry, the laboratories and the teaching were integrated.

We started back to front in the sense that basic scientists formed the place with a strong science base and research culture - the clinicians came later. Despite the fact that it was a medical school, it was not a medical school based on the power of clinicians but on the power of young scientists, which is quite extraordinary. It was a very open and very productive place. We were free to collaborate widely and we created the conditions that remained probably the best in Australia for many years.

ALS: When did discipline of neuroscience develop in Australia?

MC: Neuroscience was in the air at the time I arrived in Australia. The Society for Neuroscience in the United States was founded I believe in 1969. When I came to Melbourne in 1970 I attended a meeting a few months later at Monash, along with biochemist Laurie Austin and others. We were probably the foundation group of the Australian Neuroscience Society (ANS) and we actually did use that term but it was not organised formally.

It took another 10 years or so to formalise but we’d already had ongoing meetings almost every year.

There was a good level of active neuroscience around Australia in the late 1970s, mostly in the fields of physiology and pharmacology. The Australian Physiological and Pharmacological Society (APPS) existed at the time and we all joined. There was eventually a split between pharmacology and physiology, and most of us migrated into the neuroscience mould intentionally, although I remain also a member of the APPS and more recently the APS.

ALS: And that led to the formation of the Australian Neuroscience Society?

MC: Yes, that is a piece of history. At the time the ANS was like a big collection of brothers and sisters, it was not very formal.

Then in the early 1990s, I was asked to give the plenary lecture at the meeting in Melbourne. After I had given my lecture two senior colleagues on the ANS executive came to me and said ‘We think you should become president, would you like to do this?’ and I said ‘Wow, why not?!’

At the next meeting they chose me and I was very privileged to be president of the society in the big 1990s. At the time there were no elections, so it was a very closed shop in a way. It is now far more democratic and open.

It has been an extraordinary group of people and it still is.

I’ve been part of many societies around the world, nationally and internationally, and the ANS is distinct because we started without anyone having propriety. Neuroscience is not really a professional discipline and the advantage has been that there is no commitment to any profession; we are free to open our doors to anyone who wants to be part of the field. This has created a sense of camaraderie across disciplines without any other political reason to be together. It’s purely intellectual and that is marvellous.

ALS: You are giving a plenary for the second time at this year’s ANS meeting.

MC: Yes, the society has asked me to give a plenary lecture here in Adelaide for the second time. I don’t think it has happened before that a person has been asked twice in their lifetime.

I’ve decided I will hold them to the promise to invite me again in 20 years’ time!

ALS: How did the enteric nervous system become your research focus?

MC: When I was a student in Italy I went to talk to the Professor of Physiology and said I’d like to study the brain. He said to go next door to the Department of Anatomy because they studied a bit of the nervous system. I went, and they were studying the development of nerves in different parts of the body and a bit of the gut. I thought I’d learn the techniques and then move into the brain.

But when I started to working on the gut I realised it was a huge area of research that was totally untouched at the time. I was lucky to be given the chance to use a new histochemical technique.

So, I started really with the histochemistry in the nervous system; in particular, the enteric nervous system. I developed new methods with my supervisors - we succeeded and I published, mostly in Italian and French, but Geoff Burnstock and colleagues in Australia knew about my work as a medical student.

When I arrived in Melbourne I simply continued that work. I also learned pharmacology, electrophysiology and a bit of biochemistry. The Department of Zoology in Melbourne at that time was a very exciting place to be and at that time I began working with John Furness.

We worked on many areas and put our eyes and hands on anything that walked, slithered, slimed or flied as well as different organs, different parts of the body. The enteric nervous system became the core of the work because it was less known and probably more challenging. It was then I realised there was no reason to move away from that until I understood it a bit better. And I’m still doing it.

When I moved to Adelaide I continued working with John, who had moved to Flinders from Melbourne University a few months before me. And we continued to work together for another 14 years.

I still remember when we first got funding from the NHMRC - we were given $990. We joked at the time that we got all the money that we asked for from the NHMRC, which doesn’t happen often these days. It was only a few dollars, but we had the freedom at Flinders to start new endeavours in a small way, and with a small amount of money we could do some serious research.

ALS: Are you still in the lab?

Professor Marcello Costa and, to his left, Professor Simon Brookes with lab staff in 2003.

MC: Yes, although there was a period from 2005 that I stopped and partially retired because I was getting a bit burnt out with running a big lab and managing too many people.

About three or four years ago my younger colleagues called me back into the lab to help them a little and I realised I could still do research. I’ve returned to do experiments in the gut with a different approach and we are beginning to answer a lot of questions I had 10, 20 or 30, even 40 years ago.

Simon Brooks, who was a postdoc of mine, is now my boss. I’m still collaborating with the young person I tutored and mentored, plus a number of other people at Flinders - in particular Nick Spence - but they run the labs and I am enjoying their facilities.

One of my first medical students and then PhD student, David Wattchow, who is now a very senior surgeon, has kept us supplied with both research and precious human tissue. We have a most active and productive team at Flinders with collaborators at the CSIRO and in New Zealand, with local and national clinical colleagues extending the team beyond basic neurogastroenterology.

ALS: What is the different approach you are taking in the lab?

MC: We are studying in great detail the actual behaviour of the gut. We know a lot about the extensive network of neurons but we know little about what they are doing in real life. We assumed they were involved in movements, such as peristalsis, but we didn’t pay too much attention to the actual behaviour of the gut.

We are developing the tools to conduct a proper physiological study of the behaviour of the intestine on the basis of our understanding of the enteric nervous system. It’s like reading the brain of the intestine when it’s actually working rather than studying its cells one by one.

In the late 1990s, with my PhD student Grant Henning, I developed a way to describe the actual movement of the gut by making recordings of what are called spatio-temporal maps, which can then be analysed in a computational way. But that fell to the side when Grant left Australia and I couldn’t really maintain the level of knowledge in computer programming.

With the arrival of Phil Dinning at Flinders, who is working on the human gut using bowel scopes and recording pressure using a super, novel high-definition optical pressure probe, I’ve started to study the behaviour of the gut again. We have combined the two recording methods, so now we can study gut behaviour in animals and in humans, and attribute the movements of the gut to neural or myogenic activity, to the pacemaker cells and to intrinsic or extrinsic neural pathways.

We call our conceptual explanation of most movements the neuromechanical loop hypothesis. This means that the enteric neural activity produces a movement and the movement feeds back into the enteric neural circuits via enteric sensory neurons, which correct and adapt the changes in motor behaviour.

It’s like the sensory-motor control of movements when walking on the terrain - I call it the locomotion of the intestine, whereby you have to include a loop between sensory and motor, and a bit of neural programming within the pathways, but they don't come alive until they are interacting with the intraluminal contents which are really part of the external world.

We are funded by the ARC to develop our model on animals and we just received funding from the NHMRC to extend this to the human gut, which is wonderful.

ALS: Has teaching been an important part of your career?

MC: Teaching must always be in parallel to research in my view. I started almost single-handed a number of the neuroscience topics at the Medical School at Flinders and I’ve had the pleasure of teaching neuroscience to thousands of students over the last 20 years.

I continue to teach. It gives me great pleasure because students are following a career in neuroscience and certainly some of them have become excellent neuroscientists and some may become even great ones.

I still think teaching is the best way to keep my research meaningful because it compels me to read widely and keep up with the literature, which is growing all the time. Particularly being at Flinders, because the teaching is across disciplines.

We now get very young students because we started teaching foundation physiology from first year. I start really with the big bang - the origin of life and chemistry, physics, the biology of cells and energetics, and of course mechanisms of biological evolution.

I take the view that if you know a bit about the origins of animal bodies and physiological principles then you’ll have a much better understanding of the nature of humans and the universe. That is part of my passion, linking philosophy and culture to science, and then extending that to the whole of society.

ALS: Has this passion led to your extracurricular activities?

Professor Marcello Costa and Associate Professor Nick Spence at the International Neurogastroenterology and Motility Meeting in Italy, 2012.

MC: I am absolutely passionate about using neuroscience to overcome the traditional divide between science and humanities. It links us to everything we do, from cultural and intellectual aspects, to emotions, bodily functions and evolution.

And I am passionate about teaching people about this - politicians, people in industry, school teachers and students, other academics and the public at large - there is a wealth of information and knowledge we can extract from understanding the nervous system.

When I stopped doing lab research for a while I devoted my activities to learning more about the nervous system and society. I was involved in developing a community of neuroscientists here in South Australia and taking it nationally and abroad. Doing that I learned a lot about the social aspect of neuroscience.

In the last few years I have been involved in a very exciting project called Science Outside the Square. This involves Ian Gibbins, Professor of Anatomy at Flinders - he is a fantastic keyboard improviser and I sing and play on the guitar.

We combine science and music, science and art, and perform in public, taking advantage of small stints in the performing arts.

Having people in pubs listening to music or seeing a famous choreographer, such as Lee Warren, dance and talk about dance enables us to take a bit of neuroscience to the public and compel them to think like we do as neuroscientists. And for us scientists to understand more how performance artists think and feel. I think that role is important.

We had our peak in these activities in the last six years. I’m doing less of that now mostly because I’m back in the lab doing interesting experiments.

However, there is a big carnevale of the Italo-Australian community in South Australia each year. Within the festivities a small section takes place under the auspices of the Royal Institution of Australia. Together with Susan Greenfield, a distinguished neuroscientist who was a Thinker in Residence in South Australia in 2004-05, I was involved in creating this institution to take science to the public.

I speak during this event, which is run like a big public fair over a weekend. I have given talks on the Italian Nobel prize winner Rita Levi-Montalcini. Last year I talked about the Renaissance art and science, Galileo and science - he was also interested in the brain by the way - Leonardo da Vinci, and this year I am going to talk about Volta and Galvani, two geniuses to whom we owe respectively the discovery of the battery and the electricity in our muscle and brains.

This provides me the opportunity to talk about a bit of history and the relation of science to culture, which I’m still committed to doing in any possible way.

ALS: Do you think people understand the link between science and the humanities?

MC: I think people still have a very stark view of science, even my colleagues in science. Many are top scientists but some are very committed to the hard sciences, and perhaps politics, and don’t always see the link between chemistry and physics and the humanities - like culture and law, morality and ethics, religious beliefs and so on.

I am trying to link these areas to overcome what is, in my view, the big mistake made by our society. And that is the dual nature of us, which of course we owe to Descartes.

Fundamentally, I am attempting to define under neuroscience the two worlds of matter and mind, and under the same umbrella as the humble but potential powerful neuromechanical loop hypothesis. It may resolve the apparent divide between the material world (res extensa of Descartes) and the thinking matter - the mind, the soul (res cogitans of Descartes). All that happens inside our brain is neural, that is to say electrochemical, and when it is translated into muscle movements it becomes part of the mechanics.

People tend to talk about the mind and body all the time. They are really talking about the same thing and a small change in conceptual frame will put this under the same umbrella. To regard humans, as marvellous as we are with our mind, as a natural product of evolution - nothing less, but nothing more.