Dr. Joy Reidenberg’s career as a research scientist started with the phone book. As an adolescent she knew her interests – art, science, and math – but couldn’t figure out what career might encompass all three. Her father passed her the Yellow Pages and said, “Here, find a career.”
By Sarah Varney
Dr. Joy Reidenberg’s career as a research scientist started with the phone book. As an adolescent she knew her interests – art, science, and math – but couldn’t figure out what career might encompass all three. Her father passed her the Yellow Pages and said, “Here, find a career.”
She found the “Veterinarian” section and settled on what would turn out to be just a first step. As a pre-college intern, she got the chance to sit in on a surgery with a local vet. She considered it a privileged opportunity to see the insides of an animal. “I was very excited. I was looking forward to seeing something other than roadkill,” she said.
And then the surgery started and she fainted. “I walked out of that room like a dog with its tail between its legs,” Reidenberg recalled. Never previously the least bit squeamish, she was both embarrassed and mystified. The veterinarian explained to her that he too had once had the same experience and invited her back into the operating room.
She ended up at Cornell, where she majored in Anatomy and minored in Art History in the college of Arts and Science. She took all of the pre-veterinarian classes but the further she got in her studies, the less sure she was of her career choice. “The more I talked to vets, the more I became disillusioned with veterinary medicine. They seemed to spend most of their time vaccinating cattle or learning up-to-date surgery techniques that were usually too expensive for pet owners,” she said.
Being an “aqua-veterinarian” seemed appealing, but there was only one for the entire Northeast. Then she talked to a medical illustrator but discovered there were even fewer jobs in that field. It was her search for a summer work-study position that finally pointed her in the right direction. In his Cornell lab, Howie Evans, head of the Veterinarian Anatomy program was compiling a fish dissection manual. Reidenberg agreed to pitch in and that’s when she met up with a jarful of toad fish.
The military had an issue with this innocuous fish, the frequency of whose mating call was somehow causing some of their submarines to explode while in-dock. “He asked me to dissect and draw them. I discovered that I loved it and found out that Evans was not a veterinarian,” she said.
It was an epiphany of sorts for her. She went on to earn a doctorate at the then named Mount Sinai School of Medicine studying bio-Medical Science.
Since the 1980s, Reidenberg, who describes herself as a General Comparative Anatomist, has focused on the study of whales and dolphins. More recently, in her human-centric research, she has been looking into practical uses for the adaptations that sea mammals have made in order to survive in extreme environments. The best example is her research into the lung mechanics that make it possible for whales to dive deep without experiencing any of the ill effects that humans suffer.
“Whales don’t get the bends,” she noted. They have developed “changeable compliance capabilities” that enable them to naturally adjust to pressure changes as they ascend and descend in water. Reidenberg is studying that mechanism in hopes of ameliorating or even preventing the terrible internal damage that those in combat experience from explosions. From a pulmonary perspective, an explosion is the same as a pressure wave, she explained. However, humans can suffer severe internal damage or “blast lung,” when they experience these explosive waves. As combatants experience an explosion, the lungs first collapse and then balloon. The damage is horrific.
The question Reidenberg hopes to answer is “Can we somehow mimic some of these adaptations to protect humans?”
Stay tuned.
