The 2021 Breakthrough Prize recognizes Franco-American researcher Catherine Dulac for her work on the parental instinct. Back to his research.
- A French researcher based in the United States was rewarded for her discovery of the mechanism of parental instinct in mice.
- The Harvard research director has demonstrated that a group of neurons – present in both female and male mice – cause this behavior.
Twenty-five years since the French researcher Catherine Dulac settled in the United States as a neurobiologist. Thursday, September 10, she received the Breathrough prize – an award created in 2012 by Silicon Valley bosses – for her work on the parental instinct in mice. His subject of study, started in 2002, shows that caring for little ones is dictated by hormones. Therefore, the “maternal instinct” is just as present in male mice, provided that hormones trigger this behavior.
A discovery that did not correspond to what the researcher expected at the time. “What fascinated us was to understand which areas of the brain, the neurons, the cells that control this behavior, and to try to determine if there is a difference between the male brain and the female brain, explains the director of research at Harvard University on the waves of France culture. So we did a number of experiments and we found very specific regions of the brain, in an area called the hypothalamus, and in that area, the very particular type of neuron that is essential for the parenting behavior. The big surprise is that these neurons exist in both male and female brains.”
Parental instinct also shared
Thus, male and female mice can spontaneously take care of young mice, just as they can kill them. While male mice tend to shed young in order to mate with females, researchers have observed that the paternal instinct appears three weeks after breeding. However, the female sex mouse can also exhibit infanticidal behavior under lack of food, water, or too much predator pressure.
What about humans ? “We do not know. But the region of the brain in which these neurons are found, the hypothalamus, is a region where there are a lot of functions that are very conserved in all vertebrates, in particular in mammals, explains Catherine Dulac. It’s the region that controls hunger, satiety, thirst, sleep, reproduction, aggressive behavior, lots of behaviors that are conserved among species. Are the neurons that control the parental instinct also conserved? I bet so, but it’s going to take some research to prove it.“
It is the fact that this discovery goes against the determinism of behavior according to sex that pleased the Breakthrough 2021 jury. In addition to this recognition, the scientist received an endowment of 3 million dollars. She told AFP that she intends to donate part of it “to causes related to the health and education of women and disadvantaged populations.“
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