Diego Bohórquez keeps a first-edition hardback of the 1853 book “Memoirs of a Stomach,” written from the point of view of the stomach itself, in his office. He isn’t sure how he first became aware of the book, but it was mentioned in a 2015 New Yorker piece that referenced Bohórquez’s first published article.
Bohórquez, associate professor of medicine and neurobiology at Duke University, often quotes from this book, as he did in the introduction of his 2018 Science paper on the gut-brain neural circuit. He always uses roughly the same quote: “… and between myself and that individual Mr. Brain, there was established a double set of electrical wires, by which means I could, with the greatest ease and rapidity, tell him all the occurrences of the day as they arrived, and he could also impart on me his own feelings and impressions.”
“It’s just a beautiful passage,” Bohórquez says. “We were able to articulate for nearly 200 years the communication going on between the mind and the body, but we didn’t have the molecular biology.”
Bohórquez is after the molecular biology. Most notably, he examined and defined certain gut enteroendocrine cells, which he has named “neuropods,” when he was still a postdoctoral researcher. Later, he worked with his own lab to show how neuropods quickly communicate with the brain via glutamatergic signaling and influence decision-making about food.
A Perspective piece accompanying the 2018 Science paper noted that the findings “overturn a decades-old dogma that enteroendocrine cells signal exclusively through hormones,” and Kirsteen Browning, professor of neuroscience and experimental therapeutics at Pennsylvania State College of Medicine, says the work offered a “paradigm shift” for how the field considered gut-brain signaling. “I don’t think anyone had ever thought that vagal signaling from the gut might have this mechanism,” she says.
This has earned Bohórquez a reputation as a “trailblazer,” says Ivan de Araujo, director of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, but de Araujo notes that putting “new ideas” into a field of research is not always easy. “There will always be people saying, ‘We need more evidence.’”