Joseph Coyle, MD
As a Philosophy and French major at Holy Cross College, and at the urging of his mother, Dr. Joseph Coyle spent his junior year abroad in Paris. While there, Dr. Coyle’s thinking about life was dramatically transformed through his exposure to French appreciation for art, literature, and dining. From long dinners filled with discussion and debate to the abundance of cultural events, he learned how important these activities are for a rich life, as opposed to focusing solely on career advancement. Even today, as Director at the Laboratory for Psychiatric and Molecular Neuroscience at McLean Hospital and the Eben S. Draper Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School – two highly demanding positions – art, literature, and dining remain important aspects of his daily life. Read on to learn how Dr. Coyle went from studying literature, languages, and philosophy to a career in ground-breaking brain research, and how the skills he learned abroad have helped him all along the way.
IES Abroad: As a Philosophy and French student at Holy Cross College, why did you decide to study abroad in Paris as opposed to another French city?
Joseph Coyle: There were only a couple of programs in Europe, and I wanted to study in France. Even if there had been other programs in France, Paris is clearly the epicenter of French culture and is considered one of the finest cities in the world. I had taken six years of French in high school and college, and I was very interested in French literature, culture, and philosophers like Jean Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan. My mother had an impact on my decision, too. She was a very unusual person. Her father came from Luxembourg, and even though he was a small town doctor in Iowa, she had a very cosmopolitan view of the world and felt it was very important for me to spend my junior year abroad. She probably had a clearer understanding of the implications of that experience than I did at that point in my life.
IES Abroad: Did you have an 'ah ha' moment during your study abroad that critically changed the way you think?
JC: The experience that really changed me in Paris was how one thinks about life and living one’s life. The French are very cosmopolitan. They think of the world more broadly. Art, literature, and dining are very important parts of their life. They aren’t afterthoughts. They are at the epic-enter of their life. I have many friends who are French scientists and clinicians. They are professionally as good as we are at what they do, but there is a whole other aspect of their life that tends not to be as important here in the United States. I have lived a very different life as a result of that year spent in Paris.
My roommate and I stayed with a widow who was a ‘veuve de guerre’ (war widow), and she was the President of the ‘Veuve de Guerre’ Association. We didn’t eat with her, but we were invited over for dinner with other students and their families on Sundays. These dinners were filled with discussion and debate, lingering over the meal for a couple of hours. That was special, and it did educate me on what is important in life, how those activities make your life richer, not just what your career is and what you do professionally.
Also, on any given night in Paris, there are so many cultural events going on. Bach being played in the setting of an old church, or going to see a play by Samuel Beckett who was just coming into his own at that time and capturing that sense of loneliness and alienation that only Beckett can do in a very severe way. Those were special opportunities that I will always remember.
IES Abroad: At what point did you decide you would go on to medical school? Did study abroad play a factor in your decision to become a doctor and research scientist, or confirm your previous interest in that career direction?
JC: I came from a family of physicians, my grandfather, my father, my uncles, my cousins were all doctors. Subconsciously, I was destined to be a physician. My father was an orthopedic surgeon, a very practical man, and he was very surprised when he learned that I was going to take my junior year abroad in France. The return for my last year of college in Worcester was quite painful. At my interview with the admissions committee at Johns Hopkins Medical School, I was asked if I had any experience with research. To some puzzled looks, I confidently responded in the affirmative that I did my senior thesis on Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright, who wrote exclusively in French. But, stepping back now, in spite of this naivety about what was really meant by “research,” I am convinced that this eight-year immersion in literature, languages, and philosophy was extraordinarily helpful in developing the ability to think critically and to communicate effectively during my scientific career. Of course, the experience also greatly altered my view of the world and solidified my interests in the arts, music, and literature.
During the summer between college and medical school, I took a job as a psychiatric orderly at the local community hospital since I was vaguely interested in psychiatry as a result of my readings of Freud, Lacan, and Sartre. After a few weeks into the position, the older brother of my closest childhood friend was admitted to the ward with his first episode of schizophrenic psychosis. Soon, I became enmeshed in his paranoid delusions. I then saw psychosis as the ultimate epistemological conundrum but painfully not as abstract as Bishop Berkeley’s hypothesis of immaterialism. This experience cemented my decision to focus on psychiatry in medical school, as it seemed to be the best blend of epistemology, humanism, and medicine.
IES Abroad: You have played a key role in much of the ground breaking research that has taken place over the past few decades in the field of brain research. Can you point to any specific things you learned or experienced in Paris that contributed to the skills you have drawn upon throughout your career?
JC: At that point in my life, I had no experience in research and no real interest in biology. Brain science barely existed at that time. It was only after I went to medical school and got first hand experiences with research that I moved down that career path. However, my experience learning how to communicate in another language was ultimately very helpful for me in terms of being a scientist. The French language is incredibly precise. You know what each word is referring to; whereas English is a little more slippery. Doing experiments is crafting questions so that the answers are very clear. Both French and Latin were very helpful to understand the logic of science. And the product of science is – at the end of the day – the scientific paper. If your findings are not communicated clearly in a scientific paper, it didn’t happen! So, learning to speak and write and think in another language was very helpful to write well and clearly.
IES Abroad: Most recently, you have been Chief Scientific Officer and Director, Division of Neuroscience at McLean Hospital, the largest psychiatric affiliate of Harvard Medical School, in addition to teaching at Harvard. What are some of the exciting developments or projects you are working on at McLean?
JC: I feel extraordinarily blessed to be doing something that I really love doing and getting up in the morning and looking forward to coming into the laboratory. We are trying to understand the causes of serious mental illness like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and autism. What is very exciting now is the power of genetics (the sequencing of the genome that was mapped about 15 years ago) that has been brought to bear on these problems. Others have identified genes that confer risk for these disorders. We’ve been taking these human mutations and making the same mutation in a mouse and then see what that does to the brain. How does it affect the brain structure and function? In this way, we are finding the common pathways that cause these disorders so that much more effective treatments can be developed. It is now possible to do large scale studies that are very informative. We take these broken genes and try to find out what they do in the brain. All the previous medications that we’ve had to treat psychiatric disorders and many neurological disorders were discovered by chance and serendipity. They work pretty well, but they have a lot of side effects and don’t really do a complete job.
Now that we can understand what is going wrong, we can develop treatments that are much more focused and effective. What we’re excited about right now is that because we’re replicating the effects of these defective genes in mice, can we uncover a way to reverse these effects. We’re collaborating with a colleague at Vanderbilt who makes drugs with specific targets, and we just published a paper that demonstrates that this drug in the mouse will reverse all of that brain pathology. Up until now, we’ve always thought about treating the symptoms of these conditions – like aspirin for a fever – and that may help one aspect, but not all. This suggests that there may be treatments that are curative.
IES Abroad: Looking back on your career, what are you most proud of?
JC: When I started out, psychiatry was dominated by psychoanalytic theory and existential theory. While that is very appealing and can be helpful for some situations, they are completely unhelpful for serious mental disorders. I am proud of the fact that I started out as a part of a very small group of psychiatrists who emphasized that brain science was the way forward. The science I did was sufficiently credible that as a clinician I was elected President of the Society for Neuroscience, a worldwide research organization that is comprised almost entirely of basic scientists. I was an early advocate of brain science being the way forward in effectively dealing with serious mental illness.
IES Abroad: A few years ago, you returned to Paris with your classmates to celebrate your 50th anniversary of studying abroad. What did you and your classmates remember most fondly about your time in 1963-64?
JC: What was gratifying to me was seeing how lives unfurled for many of my classmates in very diverse ways. I remember people who were young students at the age of 19. It was a pleasure to now see them 50 years later, having made, each in their own way, very important contributions to society. Everyone who came back was gratified and changed by their experience that year.
IES Abroad: What advice do you have for pre-med students today who are considering study abroad but worried about fitting it into their rigid academic curriculum?
JC: Well, Holy Cross told me I couldn’t study abroad for a whole year 50 years ago! Junior year was the year that I was scheduled to take all the rigorous science classes I would need for medical school. And it was based on your success in those classes that you got your letters of recommendation for med school. So I didn’t do that! They told me it would be hard to get into medical school. So I took the requisite science classes in summer school at Loyola in Chicago. The bottom line was how you scored on your MCAT exam, and I did fine. However, the first two years of medical school were a struggle for me!
There are vigorous debates going on in medical education about the overemphasis of science in undergraduate years and the under emphasis of the humanities. Today there is so much emphasis on a college education being the preparation for your career, and I think it is misplaced. A grounding in the arts and sciences is necessary to being a full citizen.