Frederick “Rusty” Gage has spent his life asking a question many neuroscientists once considered heretical: can the adult brain grow new neurons?
When I photographed him at the Salk Institute in February 2026, that question felt less like rebellion and more like legacy. We made portraits in his study overlooking the Pacific, a quiet room washed in coastal light. The ocean moved below the cliffs in long, steady breaths. It is the same office once occupied by Jonas Salk, who recruited Rusty decades ago. The desk, the view, the gravity of the place. You feel it immediately. History is not abstract there. It presses in from the walls.
In the late twentieth century, neuroscience was built on a stark premise: you are born with a fixed number of neurons. Damage them and they are gone. Memory fades. Injury lingers. Aging narrows possibility. Rusty challenged that dogma with careful, methodical experiments that showed new neurons could, in fact, form in the adult hippocampus. The implications were enormous. Learning, mood, resilience, even the biology of hope took on new dimensions.
In person, what strikes you first is his attentiveness. He leans in slightly when you speak, hands folded, eyes steady behind round glasses. There is warmth in him that feels unforced. Soft spoken, yes, but never distant. You sense a mind that is constantly mapping connections, not only between neurons but between people. Students drift in and out of his orbit with ease. Colleagues seek him out. He listens more than he declares.
The study itself holds layers of meaning. Jonas Salk built the institute as a place where scientists could think expansively, where architecture and intellect met the horizon. Standing in that room with Rusty, you understand that recruitment was more than a hire. It was a passing of trust. Salk had imagined a future for biology that included imagination and risk. Rusty carried that forward into the living brain.
His work has since expanded beyond neurogenesis into how the genome shapes the nervous system over time. His lab explores mosaicism in the brain, the idea that our neurons are not genetically identical but subtly varied. The brain becomes not a static organ but a dynamic landscape, shaped by experience and by the restless choreography of DNA. It is a vision of the self that is fluid and intricate.
Photographing him in that office felt less like documenting a single scientist and more like tracing a lineage. Salk sought a vaccine that would protect children from paralysis. Rusty sought evidence that the adult brain was not condemned to decline. Both projects required a certain stubborn optimism. A belief that the body holds more possibility than we assume.
The weight of history was there, yes. But so was something lighter. A current of curiosity that refuses to settle. In Rusty Gage’s presence, you feel that science is not a monument. It is a conversation, still unfolding, with the ocean as witness.
