A Tribute to Dr. Christian Doyon

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Thread: A Tribute to Dr. Christian Doyon

A Tribute to Dr. Christian Doyon
Posted: Monday, August 06, 2007 6:59 AM (EST)

How does one even start to tell about a short but rich life? I have no idea but I’ll try my best. Christian joined Tom Moon’s lab for his PhD, and my luck would have that Christian was interested in endocrine disruption. I was brought on board his advisory committee, and then as an official co-supervisor. Christian set out to test a very interesting hypothesis on the wasting syndrome in wild animals exposed to some pollutants, for example PCBs. At that time the hormone leptin was all the rage. Christian thought that PCBs might affect this pathway. He then set out to clone leptin in trout. The PCR primer set he had was miraculously effective in all things mammalian, but never fish, birds frogs etc. We thus joined about 10 different labs worldwide that failed to clone leptin in anything but mammals and chicken. It did lead Christian to produce the first comprehensive phylogenetic analysis of leptins and he contributed greatly to the outgoing debate at the time about the evolution of this unusual hormone. However, as is often the case in research he had to re-orient his work. This was a source of great frustration to him. He wanted to look at PCBs and stress as an alternative hypothesis. He realized, as any good scientist would, that much basic information on stress responses in fish was missing. Christian, an ecologist and environmental guy by training and passion, was becoming a molecular physiologist! He collaborated with Dr. Katie Gilmour and undergraduate student Jason Leclair, developed sensitive assays to quantitate mRNA levels of stress peptides in microdissected parts of the trout brain and produced several papers on the basics of the brain’s response to stress. He was a master in the lab, and a perfectionist by nature, and as a result, his assays were of text-book quality, precision and accuracy. As an aside, I unintentionally gave him great grief in his qualifying exam about brain anatomy. He learned it, used it for his PhD, and then went on to Denis Richard’s lab in Quebec and Zul Merali’s lab back in Ottawa to do what else …but the neuroanatomy of feeding peptides in the rat brain! Along the path of his PhD, I got to know Christian as a friend. I remember a couple of stories which reveals only partially a side of Christian which should inspire us all to live fully now. This is why we should celebrate his life rather than steep in the sadness of his tragic passing. In the early days at U-Ottawa, Christian was without partner, and being somewhat sad about this grave situation he was on the prowl. He had broken up with someone in Montreal and was here in Ottawa alone. I was with Lesley, as I am now, but she was working in another town many kilometers away. Therefore, we often went together for a pint of good ale that we both enjoyed greatly. We would regale each other, and those around (like Martin), with tales of travels. Christian had some amazing experiences in Nepal and in Africa. I was so jealous. Anyway, as luck would have it, he was awestruck by this tall and beautiful new MSc student in the Department of Biology- none other than Brigitte. The evening of great pints and great stories started to fade away and in a very short time, Christian was hardly ever available for this fun. His priorities shifted, the couple was serious, they traveled to Ecuador, got married, had a lovely child named Lydia. Another time was when Christian, Katherine Lariviere and myself went to the European Comparative Endocrinology Conference in Faro, Portugal. Did we have fun! We had great food and wine, and Christian and Katherine even traveled together and sampled Porto in its place of origin. Some nights we were out till sunrise. Great times were had by all. Most impressive however, was that Christian could manage the night-life and also put on a scientific performance second to none. As I mentioned earlier, we were working on leptin evolution, in collaboration with Tom Moon and Guy Drouin. There were great controversies and public accusations surrounding some results on bird leptin. The French research team that cloned leptin in chickens were accused of producing an artefactual sequence, most probably originating from contamination of their reactions with mammalian leptin. We did not believe this and simply assumed that leptin’s evolution needed to be studied. With his results in hand, he prepared what was for me the most outstanding talk of the entire conference. I am not exaggerating. He was on a huge stage with an enormous screen. He got up there, like a professional, and presented his hypotheses regarding leptin’s evolution. Nice thing about it was the French researchers and their English accusers were in the audience and were both put in their places by a junior scientist that also happened to be a master of Canadian bilingualism. I was truly proud. Indeed, one famous bird endocrinologist (who was also working on leptin at the time) complimented me on my student’s courage and performance. I will close with one other story that mixes science with the sense of amusement. Some years ago Lesley and I were doing a lot of road trips and camping. I was struck by the carnage of road-kill. We started cataloging the mammals killed on the road. The stats are shocking. I thought what a waste of life and biological material. Surely one could harvest some valuable information from these carcasses? I started collecting all kinds of crazy samples of dead, smelly bits. Conventional wisdom was such that it would be impossible to extract RNA for gene cloning and molecular evolution studies because RNA in road-kill specimens would surely be degraded. I wanted to test this. I approached Christian since I thought he would see the opportunity here for some fun and perhaps an easy paper. He saw the humour as well as the scientific significance of the work. Well, this small side project turned out to be a lot of work but produced a fantastic paper on the utility of such samples for molecular evolution. It garnered much interest from far and wide. Christian gave a talk at the Canadian Society of Zoologists meeting in Lethbridge. I think it was titled ‘The functional genomics of flattened fauna”. The talk was excellent, he mixed humour and science, and of course I was the target of much of his comic attacks! Moreover, I was invited on Canada’s premier Science show on CBC radio- Quirks and Quarks with Bob MacDonald. We talked about road-kill, evolution of leptin and my favorite brain enzyme. Christian’s work was national publicity for my lab. Thank you my friend. You will be missed but never forgotten. Vance. Christian’s publications from his PhD at the University of Ottawa. Doyon, C, Drouin, G., Trudeau, V.L. and Moon, T.W. 2001. Molecular evolution of leptin. Gen. Comp. Endocr. 124: 188-198. Doyon, C., V.L. Trudeau, and T.W. Moon. 2003. mRNA analysis in flattened fauna: obtaining gene sequence information from road-kill and hunting samples. Can. J. Zool. 81: 692-698. Doyon, C., K.M. Gilmour, V.L. Trudeau, and T.W. Moon. 2003. Elevated Levels of Corticotropin-Releasing Factor and Neuropeptide Y mRNA in the Preoptic Area of Socially Subordinate Rainbow Trout Stress. Gen. Comp. Endocr. 133: 260-271. Doyon C, Trudeau VL, Moon TW. 2005. Stress elevates corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) and CRF-binding protein mRNA levels in rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss). J Endocrinol.186:123-30. Doyon, C., Leclair, J., Trudeau, V.L and Moon, T.W. 2006. Corticotropin-releasing factor and neuropeptide Y mRNA levels are modified by glucocorticoids in rainbow trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss. Gen Comp Endocrinol. 146:126-135.