March 2003
Volume 16, Number 3
'Wild Mice Are Smarter Than I'
 Richard L. Doty is currently director of the University of Pennsylvania Smell and Taste Center and professor of psychology in the department of otorhinolaryngology: Head and Neck Surgery. He received his BA degree from Colorado State University in 1966, his master's from California State University, San Jose (in conjunction with NASA's Ames Research Center) in 1968, and his PhD from Michigan State University in 1971. |
I am often asked how I became interested in olfaction. Like many careers, mine has been largely based on serendipity. In graduate school at Michigan State University, I was fortunate to take a zoology course from John A. King related to animal dispersal and speciation, and became fascinated with the concept that odors may play a significant role in sexual isolation among closely related animals.
Jack's laboratory had numerous species from the mouse genus Peromyscus, and I set out to establish the relative odor preferences among them, with the goal of deriving a behavioral taxonomy of the genus. It was in this process that I discovered that wild mice are much smarter than I. Although I never achieved my ultimate goal, I did discover a mid-ventral sebaceous gland in Peromyscus that proved to be a taxonomic marker (Doty & Kart, 1972), and I collected behavioral data that contributed to a theoretical paper, "A Cry for the Liberation of the Female Rodent" (Doty, 1974), which received considerable notoriety at the time.
After graduate school I completed a fellowship with the renowned comparative psychologist Frank Beach at the University of California. In one study, we found that sexual experience is critical for estrous odor preferences of beagles, and that anal sacs do not convey this information (Doty & Dunbar, 1974). In another we discovered that anesthetizing the olfactory and vomeronasal systems of male hamsters eliminates their copulatory behavior (Doty & Anisko, 1973). In 1973 I accepted a position at the Monell Center in Philadelphia, where I specialized in human psychophysics, examining interactions between endocrinology and olfactory function (Doty, Snyder, Huggins, & Lowry, 1981). Subsequently I moved to the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Hospital. After I had been in this position less than a year, a fellow psychologist, R. Gregg Settle, informed me of a National Institutes of Health request for proposals for Clinical Smell and Taste Research Centers. We both seized the moment, and solicited aid in the proposal's development.
James Snow, then chairman of the Otolaryngology Department, and later director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, provided encouragement and resources, and asked the physiological psychologist Eliot Stellar to chair our advisory committee. Although naysayers told us that we would never succeed in light of the competition, we ignored their advice, which was nonetheless well founded. I had only one NIH grant to my credit, no office, no lab, and no formal academic appointment. Gregg was in a similar position. Fortunately we succeeded, and the Smell and Taste Center was established in 1980.
An early dividend was the University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test, which provided for the first time a standardized, practical, and sensitive means for assessing smell function (Doty, Shaman, & Dann, 1984). This test led to numerous discoveries, not the least of which was that olfactory loss is common in the elderly and can be an early sign of several neurological disorders, including Alzheimer's disease (Doty, Shaman, Applebaum, Giberson, Sikorsky, & Rosenberg, 1984; Doty, Reyes, & Gregor, 1987; Doty, Deems, & Stellar, 1988).
My career path was atypical for an experimental psychologist, as I ultimately attained tenure within a clinical medical school department. There are many strengths and weakness of such a position. Medical school facilities are usually excellent, and expensive equipment necessary for some forms of specialized research such as functional imaging, is readily available. For researchers, teaching loads are low or even nonexistent. Although most medical students have little time for research, with the possible exception of summers, medical schools are a mecca for undergraduate work-study students seeking projects to improve their chances to enter medical school, and diverse types of patients are available for research. Residents are also often available for short-term (e.g., sixmonths) research rotations.
There are downsides to such an environment. The clinical faculty is very busy and may have little time for research or have quite specialized research interests. Unrealistic expectations can be placed on PhDs hired as "basic scientists," and the requisite administrative support may be lacking. Since clinical departments do not confer a PhD, there are no departmental graduate students. One's ability to do research can be vulnerable to the whims of the department chair, who can be appointed for life (although today renewable employment contracts are the norm).
PhDs are generally constrained from substantive movement into and through the medical school'sadministrative hierarchy, because they are perceived as less critical and more enigmatic entities than are physicians. The PhD's status is reflected in total salary, which in a surgical department will typically be one-fourth to one-third that of a same-age physician peer. Although often nominally higher than those in psychology departments, medical school salaries reflect 12-month rather than nine-month appointments.
For me, the strengths have outweighed the weaknesses. Psychologists whose talents and interests are of value to a medical school usually find their niche. However, such situations are not for everyone. In general, the traits of tenacity and independence and the ability to perform high quality research that engenders commensurate research funding are prerequisites for establishing such a niche.
REFERENCES
Doty, R.L., & Kart, R. (1972). A comparative and developmental analysis of the midventral sebaceous glands in 18 taxa of Peromyscus, with an examination of gonadal steroid influences in P. maniculatus bairdii. Journal of Mammalogy, 53, 83-99.
Doty, R L. (1974). A cry for the liberation of the female rodent. Psychological Bulletin, 81, 159-172.
Doty, R L., & Dunbar, I A. (1974). Attraction of Beagles to conspecific urine, vaginal, and anal sac secretion odors. Physiology & Behavior, 35, 729-731.
Doty, R L., & Anisko, J.J. (1973). Procaine hydrochloride olfactory block eliminates mating behavior in the male golden hamster. Physiology & Behavior 10, 395-397.
Doty, R L., Snyder, P., Huggins, G., & Lowry, L.D. (1981). Endocrine, cardiovascular, and psychological correlates of olfactory sensitivity changes during the human menstrual cycle. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 95, 45-60.
Doty, R L, Shaman, P, & Dann, M. (1984). Development of the University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test: A standardized microencapsulated test of olfactory function [Monograph]. Physiology & Behavior 32, 489-502.
Doty, R L, Shaman, P., Applebaum, S.L., Giberson, R., Sikorsky, L., & Rosenberg, L. (1984). Smell identification ability: Changes with age. Science, 226, 1441-1443.
Doty, R L, Reyes, P, & Gregor, T. (1987). Presence of both odor identification and detection deficits in Alzheimer's disease. Brain Research Bulletin, 18, 597-600.
Doty, R L, Deems, D, & Stellar, S. (1988). Olfactory dysfunction in Parkinson's disease: A general deficit unrelated to neurologic signs, disease stage, or disease duration. Neurology, 38, 1237-1244.
