From roaches to flies
The obstacle was a detour that opened up new vistas.
“NMDA receptors can play a role in memory formation in human beings, but until this recent discovery, the scientific community was unaware not only of their presence but also of their functionality in insects. The follow-up therefore is: Do insects, like human beings, have memory?” he queries.
Wishing to plumb the depths of this mystery, he contacted his old PhD advisor, Coby Schal, whose recommendation facilitated a collaboration with geneticist Tim Tully, internationally recognized as one of the foremost authorities on Drosophila memory, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, New York.
But only two weeks after Chiang’s arrival came the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Everyone was too devastated to work, and nobody was willing to pay any mind to some unassuming visiting Asian scholar.
Without much to occupy him, Chiang found himself meandering about the lab. One day, when he chanced upon a postdoctoral researcher coping with an extremely murky slide of a Drosophila mushroom body, he couldn’t resist coming to the rescue by unleashing his magic-formula FocusClear.
“In the blink of an eye, the slide snapped into sharp focus, and the fellow’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets!” He chuckles as he recalls this watershed moment. A week later, the two collaborated on a paper that was published in Current Biology.
From that moment on, Chiang’s reputation took off. His laboratory teemed with people wanting to work with him. After returning to Taiwan a year later, he received countless invitations from Cold Spring Harbor. Between 2002 and 2006 he assisted no less than 10 top-deck international neuroscience experts with a series of important publications. His unselfish attitude led Tim Tully to praise him as someone who “really gives freely of himself” in cooperating with others.
“If you want to work with the best in the world, you have to share your abilities unstintingly and make yourself needed before others will be willing to open up to you,” says Chiang.
The credo “make yourself valuable” is what has positioned Chiang to be able to learn from the best and what has allowed his research group to rise to world-class status in such a short period. When his groundbreaking work on Drosophila olfactory representation appeared in Cell in 2007, all of the American scientists with whom he had worked went out of their way to give him the thumbs up and to tell him, “We’re so proud of you!”
A team of NTHU PhD students comprising (left to right) Chen Chun-chao, Wu Jie-kai, Lin Hsuan-wen, and Pai Tsung-pin was responsible for discovering one of the locations of long-term memory in Drosophila. Their findings were published in the esteemed international journal, Science.