Before turning 10, Beatriz Rico (Madrid, 1970), had already written that she was going to make a mark in Science. "I want to be a scientist and I will cure something." Today she is a Professor of Developmental Neurobiology and leads her own laboratory at the MRC Centre for Neurodevelopmental Disorders at King's College in London.
Her project Development of inhibitory circuits in the human cerebral cortex has received four million pounds to investigate the mechanisms through which interneuronal connectivity develops in the human brain. "This is a Wellcome Discovery Award that will allow us to recruit the necessary staff over the next eight years." This British organization provides resources for bold and creative research to achieve significant changes in the understanding of human life, health, and well-being.
That is just one of the goals her team has. "My laboratory is focused on three main questions: understanding how neurons connect during development, why we learn better when we are young, and what happens when there are problems during brain development and alterations occur." In short, "understanding the wiring of our brain."
Quite a challenge for this Biology student from the Complutense University who encountered neuroscience during her studies with Maite Solas and Benjamín Fernández, with whom she began her journey into the study of the nervous system. And that coincidence became a point of no return. "I started to focus on it. And from there to my thesis at the Autonomous University of Madrid."
"I wanted to know everything about the brain, perhaps it is the last organ a student thinks about." Her curiosity and thirst for answers have always been there. To satisfy it, she approached scientific resources available to her from a young age: "I had a microscope, a Chemistry set... I was clear that I was going to dedicate myself to science."
These days she is visiting Madrid to participate in the Neuroscientific and Educational Conference of the Querer Foundation. Her presentation How neurons connect and what happens when their connections fail, will highlight current research and studies on the brain. "We have very interesting projects in the lab that are progressing well," she emphasizes.
Rico exudes enthusiasm and passion for her work, even with a screen between us during the conversation. "I seek to answer questions, it is my way of working and that of any scientist. Sometimes it takes more or less time to find the complete answer. Science requires time and is difficult to convey."
She does not hesitate to leave a message for the political class that does not support science because the ways of scientists have nothing to do with theirs: "Politics has not supported Science as it deserves, regardless of the party. Sometimes politicians do not understand that transformative discoveries in science require long-term investments. A good example is the development of COVID vaccines: how many years of investment in fundamental biology prepared us to produce effective vaccines in less than a year." With these premises, she is clear about how Science should be. "The research we do today must serve others. They can base their advances on it, and if it is not solid or rigorous, it will be wrong and cannot be used in the next steps."
A scientist guided by great professors
Alongside Carmen Cavada, Professor of Anatomy and Embryology at the Autonomous University of Madrid, she learned to "do good science." From her, she acquired that perfectionism pursued by researchers, "she taught me that details are important and that translates into rigor." Rico inadvertently boasts of having also trained alongside biologist Ardem Patapoutian, one of the recent Nobel Prize winners in Medicine. "I was fortunate to learn molecular biology from him. It was a magnificent contribution from both a conceptual and technical point of view."
They both coincided at the Neuroscience Laboratory of Louis Reichardt. "It was during my postdoc at the University of California in San Francisco." She stayed there for about five years and, in addition to delving even further into neurobiology, she took away a lesson that she still holds dear today: "There is nothing you cannot do."
Louis Reichardt was the first American to climb Everest without an oxygen bottle, only with his lungs. "When I arrived, he proposed a project with total freedom. He was very generous in terms of resource availability and, at the same time, demanding in terms of work." Rico did not feel prepared to take on the development of the proposal. "I lacked the experience, but someone from his team made it clear to me that that could not be my answer: 'You cannot tell a person who climbs a K2 with their lungs that you cannot do something, you can only say that you are not interested, because that they will understand'."
Since then, Rico combines the curiosity of her childhood, the rigor of Cavada, and the perseverance of Reichardt in her projects to unravel the secrets of brain wiring. She started as a principal investigator at the Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante and then moved to London. "Through our research, we aim to better understand how cortical circuits are built, how they respond to activity, and what happens when these circuits fail during development periods. Understanding the details of these processes is also a necessity for medicine, as abnormal wiring would underlie serious neuropsychiatric disorders, such as autism and schizophrenia," she summarizes.
Publications in Nature and Science have featured articles that have pointed out key discoveries from her research. It was in the former that a gene with an important role in schizophrenia was first revealed. "This is the ErbB4, with a significant role in the assembly of GABAergic circuits. We were able to show for the first time a molecule capable of simultaneously controlling inhibitory circuits by regulating the inputs these neurons receive and the connections they send. Our findings have opened up research perspectives linking pathologies such as schizophrenia to this deficiency." In these works, Rico has collaborated with Óscar Marín, director of the Center for Neurodevelopmental Disorders at King's College. "Right now, we have a project with a large team of clinical collaborators. We have what we call computational scientists: data engineers and algorithm designers who help us develop computational models."
Over the past decade, there have been "giant" steps in the field of Neurology. The Brain Atlas and the maps of different animal species that have been published have helped reveal how this command center works. Recently, the conclusions of the MiCrONS project were published: analyzing the complexity of a cubic millimeter of the mouse cerebral cortex, specifically in its visual area where scientists detailed around 84,000 neurons, 524 million synapses, and over 5.4 kilometers of neural wiring. Before that, the FlyWire project was published, which elaborated the first map of the fruit fly's brain connections.