A polyglot scientist speaks the language of the lab and the fieldRobert M. Sapolsky just turned 41. In four short decades, he has earned an undergraduate degree in biological anthropology from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Rockefeller University, New York City, in neuroendocrinology, and has reached the ranks of full professor in biological sciences at Stanford University. He also has been a research associate at the Institute of Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya (Nairobi), a MacArthur Fellow, and one of the National Science Foundation's Presidential Young Investigators.
Like any young researcher making his way to the top of his profession, Sapolsky has published more than 200 papers, most but not all in peer-reviewed journals. This creative researcher-one of the first to chart the effects of chronic stress on the brain-is also a talented writer who does an occasional essay for The New Yorker, Discover, and The Sciences. He is also the author of three books. The two most recent ones-"Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" and "The Trouble with Testosterone and Other Essays"-have been Los Angeles Times Book Award finalists. He sits on five editorial boards, is a contributing editor to The Sciences, travels frequently to present his research to learned gatherings, and still finds the time to direct a large neuroscience laboratory studying everything from stress-induced brain cells to genes piggybacking viruses as possible therapeutics to protect the nervous system from assault. He also carves out one month a year-it used to be three or four-to study free-ranging olive baboons living among the Masai on the Serengeti Plains of East Africa. He's been studying these baboons for 20 years, mapping the effects of stress in these rank-dominant primates. Ecologically, his baboons are well off: They have plenty of food, room to roam, and few enemies. They have the time to "devote themselves to distressing others," says Sapolsky. "Just like us." And just like us, Sapolsky has identified the baboon equivalent of Type A personality that is "hostile in the globalizing, personalizing way that a human Type A is." And wouldn't you know it, just like us, this baboon has "cardiovascular profiles that are similar to those seen in human Type As."
Sapolsky's field studies have been duly documented in peer-reviewed journals and such general-interest magazines as Scientific American. His findings are nuanced, of course, but boil down to this: If you don't want to get a stress-related disease, "you don't want to be a low-ranking female baboon any more than a low-ranking male baboon." Just like in humans. Unlike the males, whose rank can change, female baboons inherit their rank from their mothers. Again, unlike the males, females receive a large amount of social support from other females, which Sapolsky believes "translates into a great deal of stress management." Like baboons, the human female is "far more socialized to be socially interdependent," Sapolsky notes. And the results of this socializing are best seen in old age, where "for men, merely having friends is very salutary, while for women, it's got to be good friendships." This is "very similar to a psychoimmune finding I find endlessly amusing," Sapolsky adds. "For a man, being married is a great thing for the immune system. For a woman, it is not just being married but being in a good marriage." The baboons have other lessons to teach. In their fairly safe haven, Sapolsky's lower ranking baboons are not getting sick from the threat of being gored by a leopard, but from psychological stressors-just like humans. Psychological variables are much easier to manipulate than are physiological ones. "We are stressed because of psychological interpretations of ambiguous events, and those are the ones that are far more amenable to reframing, and rationalizing, and putting in context," Sapolsky explains. In the bush, Sapolsky rises at 6 AM and is with his baboon troop by 7 AM, either observing and recording their behavior or trying to anesthetize one for physiological study. It usually takes Sapolsky a couple of hours to bring down a baboon with his anesthetizing blowgun. But by 9 AM, he hauls a baboon back to his camp, where he spends the remainder of the day "taking blood samples, monitoring blood pressure, and carrying out the various physiological experiments." By dusk, the animal is in a recovery cage and is released to his troop, no worse for wear, the next morning. Sapolsky's stress-relieving month in the bush is primitive by most standards. Home is a tent. Water for cooking and washing comes from the nearby river. Cooking is done over a wood-burning campfire. And power comes from the jeep's battery or a flashlight. But from this primitive setting, Sapolsky can bring back observations that he can test in his laboratory. "From the start, from college, I have always done the laboratory neurobiology in parallel with the fieldwork, mainly because I think each is kind of a setting for testing the validity of the other," Sapolsky explains. The dimensions of his lab and fieldwork over the years have diverged in opposite directions. "The lab work has become more and more reductive. It has gotten down to the level of cultured neurons in dishes, and it is now down to the level of genetic manipulations of them. At the same time, the fieldwork has gone more in the direction of sociology in that I am now looking at behavioral patterns between troops." So one has become more reductive, the other more integrative, but both help Sapolsky ferret out the secrets of how stress makes us sick. Return to article |
