New head in Vienna

Abstract

Graham Tebb reports on the appointment of the developmental neurobiologist, Barry Dickson, as the new director of the Institute of Molecular Pathology in the Austrian capital. Graham Tebb reports on the appointment of the developmental neurobiologist, Barry Dickson, as the new director of the Institute of Molecular Pathology in the Austrian capital. The Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, Austria has recently announced that Barry Dickson will assume the position of Director in January 2006. Dickson will thus follow in the footsteps of Max Birnstiel, the Institute’s first Director, and Kim Nasmyth, who will leave to head the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford (see Curr. Biol. 14, R452–R453). The appointment was made following the recommendation of an international scientific commission headed by Piet Borst of Amsterdam. Dickson was born in Australia but after completing his university studies in mathematics and in biology he moved to Zurich, Switzerland, where he obtained his doctorate in the group of Ernst Hafen, who was studying the development of the Drosophila eye. He then spent a year and a half at the University of California in Berkeley, working with Corey Goodman on the Drosophila central nervous system. He continued this work after his return to Zurich in 1996 and two years later he accepted a position as Group Leader at the IMP in Vienna, where he remained until 2003. During this period Dickson addressed the question of how a few thousand genes can direct the assembly of complex neuronal circuits, such as the human brain. As a model system he continued to use the fruit fly Drosophila, which offers a powerful set of genetic tools, and he focused on identifying and characterizing the ligands and receptors that guide axons. The elucidation of the ‘Robo code’ for axon pathway selection, reported by his and Goodman’s groups, represented a genuine breakthrough in developmental biology. Dickson was also able to show that the regulated intracellular trafficking of Robo guidance receptors is responsible for determining which axons extend across the midline of the central nervous system; and more recently he has also characterized an intracellular signalling pathway that links guidance receptors to the growth cone cytoskeleton. Taken together, this research has played a major part in identifying the signals that guide axons, in explaining why various axons differ in their response to these signals, and in showing how the signals guide axons to their final positions. In 2003 Dickson was appointed Senior Scientist at the Institute for Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) in Vienna (see Curr. Biol. 13, R39–R40). He used this short move — the IMBA is immediately adjacent to the IMP and the latter institute still houses Dickson’s lab — as an opportunity to rethink the scientific questions he wished to tackle and the result was a complete change in his scientific direction. As he says, after nearly ten years of working on “someone else’s problem” (Goodman’s) it was time to find a question of his own to address. He thus switched to investigating the origins of complex innate behaviour, using the sexual behaviour of Drosophila as a model system. In the short time since, Dickson’s progress has been astounding. His group has been focussing on the role of the fruitless gene, which is known to be differently spliced in males and females. The significance of this observation has long been the subject of debate but Dickson’s groundbreaking work, which is shortly to be published, has gone a long way towards resolving the issues. Another project to which Dickson is devoting his attention relates to the generation of a set of about 15,000 transgenic fly strains, each of which will permit the targeted disruption of a single gene. When completed, the library will enable sophisticated experiments to examine the importance and function of individual genes in determining behaviour, experiments that would have been unthinkable until very recently. As around 70% of Drosophila genes have human counterparts, the library may also be useful to test gene function in models of human disease. Dickson is working towards establishing a facility for making the fly strains available to the research community, although this is still some way from realization. Dickson has thus rapidly established himself as one of the world’s leading developmental neurobiologists. He is aware that the administrative tasks that come with the post of IMP Director may require him to scale down his group somewhat but he is relishing the fresh challenge that heading the Institute will offer. As he says, “I feel highly honoured to have been offered this prestigious post and look forward very much to shaping the future of the Institute. The IMP has first-rate facilities and an excellent group of scientists and it will be my job to ensure that they continue to perform the research they are capable of.”