Ishmail Abdus-Saboor has been fascinated by the variety of the natural world since he was a boy growing up in Philadelphia. The nature walks he took under the tutelage of his third grade teacher, Mr. Moore, entranced him. “We got to interact and engage with wildlife and see animals in their native environment,” he recalled. Abdus-Saboor also brought a menagerie of creatures — cats, dogs, lizards, snakes and turtles — into his three-story home, and saved up his allowance to buy a magazine that taught him about turtles. When adults asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, “I said I wanted to become a scientist,” he said. “I always raised eyebrows.”
Abdus-Saboor did not stray from that goal. Today, he is an associate professor of biological sciences at the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University, where he studies how the brain determines whether a touch to the skin is painful or pleasurable. “Although this question is fundamental to the human experience, it remains puzzling to explain with satisfying molecular detail,” he said. Because the skin is our largest sensory organ and a major conduit to our environment, it may hold clues for treating conditions from chronic pain to depression.
To find those clues, Abdus-Saboor probes the nervous system at every juncture along the skin-to-brain axis. He does not focus on skin alone or home in on only the brain as many others do. “We merge these two worlds,” he said. That approach, he added, requires mastering two sets of techniques, reading two sets of literature and attending two sets of scientific meetings. “It gives us a unique leg up,” he said. It has led to a landmark paper published last year in Cell that laid out the entire neural circuit for pleasurable touch.
Abdus-Saboor has also pioneered a new quantitative measure of pain in mice, a tool he and his team adapted to gather evidence for the transgenerational inheritance of opioid addiction. His results in rodents hint that excessive parental opioid use may alter gene expression in ways that put children at risk for the same.
A recipient of numerous awards for his accomplishments, Abdus-Saboor was named to the inaugural class of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Freeman Hrabowski scholars last May. The award provides up to $8.6 million over a decade to rising-star early-career researchers whose labs foster diversity and inclusion.
Quanta spoke with Abdus-Saboor about his penchant for starting over in science, his zebra fish eureka moment and his hopes for a newly imported naked mole rat colony. The interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.