Spiders, flies and finding the right questions | Dr Joerg Albert

Dr Joerg Albert will never forget the day he became a spider-man.  

It was the Summer of 1981. And as happened most mornings, 10-year old Joerg woke up well before his parents and older brother.  

He decided to explore the dew-covered orchard of the family home in the German town of Warburg.  

That’s when something caught his eye.  

“Little droplets of water had crystallised on a little structure which I saw was a spider web,” Joerg recalls. “It was just so beautiful that I stood there staring at it thinking, Wow, who built that? Where is the spider? There must be a spider.”  

“Suddenly, a spider came. And to my great surprise, the spider caught a little fly, a Drosophila, in the web.” 

Joerg wasn’t aware what a Drosophila (which translates to ‘lover of dew’) was back then. 

“When constructing our memories we are always juggling truth and beauty,” Joerg smiles. “So, a Drosophila it was.” 

What he also didn’t realise back then is that the two creatures before him would occupy much of his life’s work. 

Joerg’s parents always encouraged in their children an inquisitive nature. 

His father was an avid reader. At one point in time, their family home held over 4,500 books. They competed for space with the house’s inhabitants. But it was a friendly competition, one of mutual benefit. The books had a home and the inhabitants had something to read. 

Not long after discovering the spider web in his family garden (deciding that it was on the same day would be awesome but maybe taking the creative licenses we all hold when writing and rewriting our vitae, a touch too far, Joerg fears), Joerg was wandering the vast bookshelves of his father’s library and decided to select a book at random.  

“I'm not a believer in fate, but I picked out a book on everything you need to know for an admission to a university course in biology. The book’s German, rather technocratic title, was Abiturwissen Biologie. And I read the whole book within two days, at the age of about 11. Of course, I didn't understand everything, but I understood that it was something really, really cool.” 

Though Joerg briefly considered a career in journalism, he found that he kept returning to a love for natural science. When explaining this pull, he draws parallels with the very thing that inspired his career choice.  

“When spiders are running, they are always leaving a thread,” he says. “They can use this thread to return back to the position they were coming from. And I felt that I myself had started anchoring my future to a certain point that I could return to. A thread I had started weaving in the garden of my parents.” 

He began a PhD at the University of Vienna studying the sensory organs of the spider. 

Joerg’s post-doctoral studies shifted from the spider to Drosophila, commonly known as ‘the fruit fly’. And where he previously focused on the sensation of touch, he turned his attention to antennal ears and the sense of hearing.  

But, why fruit flies? 

“Every scientific model needs to be a simpler image of the object of study,” Joerg explains. “How can we understand the complex hearing in our own ears, which uses a beautiful organ called the cochlea? How can the cochlea be understood and modelled in a way that is simpler than the cochlea itself?”  

“In spiders, you hit a wall. You need a molecularly accessible model. And this was Drosophila.” 

It’s a focus he brought to the UCL Ear Institute, where he has worked for the past 15 years.  

“At a place like the UCL Ear Institute, which is so explicitly dedicated to the understanding of human hearing and deafness, it might appear a little eccentric to investigate the ears of fruit flies,” he said.  

“But it is nothing like that. After all, fruit flies and mammals, like mice and men, share a common evolutionary history of roughly three billion years which is still reflected by a considerable overlap of the molecular machineries that orchestrate the development of their ears.” 

Joerg’s research has always been predicated on this core belief. That advancements in the understanding of humans need not start with the study of humans. 

Joerg’s research is also distinct in its methodology.  

He is a basic researcher. This type of research focuses on broadening the understanding of a subject, and not necessarily solving a problem (categorised as applied research). 

“Basic research is not designed to answer questions. It is research meant to find questions,” he says. 

For Joerg and his team, it’s about finding the right questions.  

“Basic research has to be nurtured. When it comes to fighting disease, we have usually achieved this by not restricting, but enabling research.” 

Age-related hearing loss is a focal point of Joerg’s research. 

His understanding of this isn’t limited to one side of the microscope. He has experienced early-onset hearing loss himself over the past decade, and makes use of a hearing aid in day-to-day life.  

Globally one third of people (1.23 billion people) aged over 65 experience have hearing impairment. 

“The fight against deafness is not this absolutist fight to stop the ear from ever becoming deaf,” he says. “We just have to push it, maybe 10-15 years, so that the onset of age-related hearing loss and our life expectancy are in-line.” 

The Drosophila may hold key answers in this regard. In recent years, Joerg and a team of UCL researchers found that, like humans, flies also experience age-related hearing loss. 

“A day in the life of a fly is a year in the life of a human. So when we start losing hearing at the age of 50 or 55, flies can start losing their hearing at day 50 or 55. And at 70-75, they are completely deaf.” 

Perhaps the most logical question would be to ask, why does the fly lose its hearing at this point? 

However, the basic research mindset in Joerg approaches it differently.  

“Why it happens is one question,” he says. “But I think maybe we have overlooked another question. Why does hearing not decay sooner?” 

"What happens until day 50, when their hearing seems to be ok? While hearing is constant, which genes are the most variable?” 

With the aid of modern bioinformatics, computer technology that helps disseminate large pools of data, Joerg and his team can focus on the regulatory genes that impact the approximately 8,000 genes that are akin to ‘worker bees’. 

“If you think of these genes as the puppets, we are asking, which genes are the puppeteers?” 

It is questions like this that could pave the way to pivotal breakthroughs in age-related hearing loss. 

So how does a basic researcher, driven by the quest for questions, switch off from work? 

Joerg laughs and hesitates a little. 

“I find this a very good question,” he says. “Unfortunately, I am not the best example to give it an answer. But I realise I have to find something to answer it with. It’s really important.” 

This year, as part of the UCL Global Mobility scheme, Joerg has begun dividing his time between the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg and the Ear Institute at UCL. At times, he has found it difficult to switch off from the all-consuming nature of his research. But he acknowledges that he needs to. For Joerg, that means more cycling. More reading. And especially, more writing. 

“I’m a very handwriting-obsessed person. It’s very important for me to write things down. And it has nothing to do with making yourself heard, but rather, to hear yourself.” 

When people list their favourite animals, spiders and flies don't figure prominently. Where many see a household pest, Joerg sees organisms so remarkably in tune with their senses that we have much to learn from them.  

And that maybe, just maybe, in unlocking their secrets we may find breakthroughs in our own biology. 

Related

• Dr Joerg Albert's academic profile
• UCL Ear Institute
• Images courtesy of Aaron Burden and Andriyko Podilnyk