Michael Meaney elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Neurobiologist Michael Meaney has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As announced on April 24. Meaney, professor emeritus, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry, is among the newly elected 250 new members of the Academy, and one of only 25 new international honorary members.

Founded in 1780, the American Academy is one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific societies in the United States. Its current membership includes more than 300 Nobel laureates, some 100 Pulitzer Prize winners, and many of the world’s most celebrated artists and performers.

“McGill congratulates Professor Emeritus Michael Meaney on this prestigious award, which recognizes the profound impact of his life’s work on science, including neuroepogenetics, the field he launched, and on public health policy,” said Martha Crago, vice chair. Research and innovation. “His exceptional, interdisciplinary research has helped us better understand the biological consequences of early life adversity and address the resulting social challenges through improved clinical practices and social support programs.”

Pioneering work in epigenetics

Despite graduating in December, Meaney chuckles at the suggestion that he has retired. “Last year I contributed to 43 published articles, so I’m anything but retired,” says Meaney. For the past fifteen years, he has commuted back and forth from his laboratory and ‘home base’ at the Douglas Research Center to the Singapore Institute of Clinical Sciences, where he heads the Translational Neurosciences Program.

Meaney’s work examines the intersection of stress, maternal care, and gene expression. His team was the first to show that maternal care directly influences the expression of genes that influence the brain development and functioning of offspring.

His collaboration with Moshe Szyf, a biochemist and professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics of the School of Biomedical Sciences, led to their groundbreaking epigenetic work in the early 2000s.

Meaney and Szyf showed that rat pups that received significant maternal care during infancy developed into adults and were much less reactive to stress than their less cared for brothers. Meaney’s team was then able to demonstrate the chemical change in the brain of a well-cared for puppy and then directly manipulate the expression of the genes that control the production of stress hormones.

The core finding of Meaney and Szyf’s teams was the effect of maternal care on the epigenetic state of genes that influenced stress reactivity. The pair are said to have pioneered the field of behavioral epigenetics. “We bonded around an idea that Moshe developed that showed that the epigenetic signals of cancer cells could be directly modified,” says Meaney. “In his case, because of the diagnosis and the therapy. In my case, to gain insight into the environmental regulation of brain development.”

Power of collaboration

Meaney and Szyf then worked with clinical researchers, most notably Gustavo Turecki of the Douglas, to provide evidence for an effect of childhood trauma on the same genes identified in the rat studies. Later collaborations with Rachel Yehuda of Mount Sinai Medical School in New York showed that these epigenetic signals could predict vulnerability to symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

For Meaney, the work he did with Szyf and Turecki is indicative of the creative power of collaboration.

“That speaks to the enormous benefits of being at a place like McGill, where there is so much great science, that you can have a dialogue with people who have such different perspectives and so much expertise,” he says. “As a scientist you want to be at an institution where you have those opportunities. The only limiting factor is your own imagination. I am blessed that McGill gave me those opportunities.”

Not afraid to fail

Election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is Meaney’s most recent honor. Meaney is a member of both the Order of Canada and the Royal Society of Canada and has won a number of awards, including the Margolese Brain Disorder Prize (2016); the Wilder-Penfield Award (2014); the Klaus J. Jacob Research Prize (2014); and the CIHR Senior Scientist Career Award (1997). He was also named the most cited scientist in neuroscience in 2007 by the Institute for Scientific Information.

The secret, he says, is failure.

“I’m exceptionally good at being wrong,” he says, noting that many funding agencies are “obsessed with the idea that you make a hypothesis and then confirm it. To me this has always been absurd, because if you started with a hypothesis and confirmed it, you have learned nothing.

“The best part is that you find out that it’s not as easy as you thought – or that it’s not at all what you thought. So you go back to the drawing board,” he says. “For me it is this dialogue with biology. You go back and forth with questions and you get an answer that depends on the cleverness of your question. I always hoped that the outcome of a good analysis would be a much better question.

“The truth is out there. The question is: how do you find out?”