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(03/24/16 12:14am)
Rockefeller University Professor of Chemical Biology Sean Brady gave a talk last Friday, March 18 titled “Watch Your Step: There’s New Chemistry Everywhere.” Brady uses a genetic sequencing approach to search for new antimicrobial compounds in previously uncharacterized bacteria in soil samples. He described his research with two phrases: “new drugs from new bugs” and “drugs from dirt.”
We derive many of our therapeutic drugs from nature. For instance, Alexander Flemings first isolated penicillin in 1928 from a mold that accidently killed the bacteria he was researching in a lab. Microbes fight in evolutionary arms races with other microbes, and have evolved biosynthetic pathways that produce antimicrobial compounds to protect themselves. We can exploit their natural arsenals for our own medical benefit.
“One thing we can clearly find is that nature is playing with resistance,” Brady said. “We can find molecules in nature that have better activity against bacteria. The resistance we fight in the clinic is no different than the resistance that bacteria are fighting out in the environment.”
The search for new antibiotics has assumed a new urgency as bacteria have begun to evolve resistance to our antibiotics. The World Health Organization recently issued a report on antibiotic resistant bacteria, saying, “it is a problem so serious that it threatens the achievements of modern medicine. A post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries can kill, far from being an apocalyptic fantasy, is instead a very real possibility for the 21st century.”
Traditionally, drug hunters have isolated bacteria from the environment and grown them up in a lab in order to characterize the chemicals they produce. This approach yielded dozens of useful antibiotics in the 20th century. But Brady argued that traditional approaches are inadequate and inefficient and that new methods are needed to find antibiotic resistant drugs.
One problem with the traditional method of growing environmental bacteria in the lab is that the vast majority of microbes present in environmental samples don’t grow. Even microbes that do grow in the lab don’t express all their enzymes, so we don’t know the full repertoire of compounds they produce.
“As successful as the traditional approach has been, there are some weird quarks about it,” Brady said. “If you think about it, the approach is almost 100 years old, and there aren’t too many fields of science that you could argue you are doing the exact same thing as 100 years ago. Over the past decade there has been a recognition of the key limitations of the approach.”
To remedy these problems, Brady has developed a new method for discovering natural products using genetic sequencing. First, he collects soil from an environment. So far his lab has gathered thousands of soil samples from across the world, from the Amazonian rainforest to the Sahara dessert. Next, he isolates DNA from the all bacteria in the soil. Unlike culturing bacteria, which favors the growth of a few species, DNA collection insures that almost all the bacteria in a sample are represented. Then he creates a library of all the biosynthetic gene clusters, which are packets of genes that create natural products. Most biosynthetic gene clusters have conserved sequence regions, which act as molecular tags or barcodes, that allow his lab to sift through the library of biosynthetic gene clusters and search for new biosynthetic gene clusters that are related to already known biosynthetic clusters that produce interesting and useful compounds. Finally, he takes a biosynthetic gene cluster of interest and artificially transfers it into bacteria in the laboratory to analyze the product it produces.
“We can take any drug structure we want to identify, and we can go back and systematically interrogate the world for it and ask if we can find better versions of that drug,” Brady said.
Brady’s method for drug discovery has already yielded promising results. One example he used was his lab’s efforts to find new, more effective versions of an antibiotic drug called Daptomyocin.
“Daptomyocin is considered the first antibiotic to have a new mode of actioin 20 years. It makes Merck a billion dollars. They tell us it’s really rare – no it’s not rare, we can go find lots of daptomyocin-like structures out in nature, and we’re beginning to investigate new daptomyocin from soil samples.”
In addition to finding biosynthetic gene clusters that make compounds similar to already known compounds, his lab has also identified novel biosynthetic gene clusters with unknown products.
“As we survey the world and generate millions of new sequences tags, about five percent of our sequence tag trace back to something we know, but about 95 percent of our sequences are new. We are trying to find ways to use this information to guide the discovery of novel compounds.
Brady’s new method for drug discovery is changing how scientists search for medically relevant compounds in nature, and hopefully will yield new drugs that will enable doctors to fight antibiotic diseases in the future.
(02/18/16 12:01am)
The College has a large pre-medical program: this year, more than 50 Middlebury students applied to medical school. One of the College’s best opportunities for pre-medical students is the Porter internship. Run by Dr. Hannah Benz, the CCI pre-medical advisor, and Dr. Eric Benz, an orthopedic surgeon at Porter Hospital, the program allows for 15 students to shadow doctors at the hospital during J-term. This year, I was fortunate enough to be one of the participants.
Students are placed with a home preceptor, with whom they spend the majority of the month. Preceptors are doctors from pediatrics, orthopedic surgery, ER, cardiology and family care. Their mentorship is perhaps the most important aspect of the Porter internship. Porter interns gain exposure to an certain area of medicine, as well as receive close guidance and advice about medical careers and the U.S. healthcare system.
Students are also able to participate in electives and shadow doctors in different areas of medicine. Interns can spend a day observing the hospital lab and blood bank, working alongside a nurse in home health, watching surgeries or shadowing radiologists.
I quickly learned that the technical aspects of medical knowledge, such as knowing which tests to run or drugs to prescribe, are only a part of a doctor’s job. Medical expertise also relies on a doctor’s ability to navigate the healthcare system and understand their patients on a personal level. For instance, my preceptor had to deal with health insurance companies denying medical coverage to patients, or pharmaceutical companies raising drug prices beyond a patient’s financial means. One patient with Wilson’s disease, a dangerous but treatable disorder that leads to the insufficient metabolization of copper, had their annual treatment expense raised from $888 to $26,000. My preceptor was forced to find an alternative, albeit less effective, generic drug for this rare disease.
Andrew Holtz ’16.5, a Porter intern who shadowed a doctor in the ER, gained valuable insight on some of the difficulties that face ER doctors.
“I was able to learn how the providers in the ER approached difficult conditions such as depression, alcoholism and drug-seeking behavior,” Holtz said. “It’s easy to become detached from the world around us while at Middlebury, and the internship was successful in showing me the problems that many of our neighbors suffer from.”
The goal of the internship is to help students decide whether they want to go into medicine. Dr. Tim Cope, a retired family physician and current teacher at UVM medical school, participated in the pioneering year of the internship program in 1976.
“There wasn’t any structure at first,” he said. “It was me and one student. The program grew over time. It took a while, maybe 10 years. For a while, we had another parallel program in medical anthroplogy, which was run by David Napier [a former Middlebury professor of anthropology]. Students could go anywhere to witness rural medicine. Some went to Scotland to be in the rural areas of the Highlands.”
Dr. Cope and David Napier carried out a study of Vermont physicians to assess their levels of career satisfaction. Results indicated that physicians who had more experience with medicine before becoming a doctor were happiest with their jobs.
“I think the idea of the internship is not to convince people to go into medicine,” Cope said. “It’s to help them figure out what they want to do. The people I think I have helped the most are the people who thought they wanted to go into medicine, and then said, ‘Nope, that’s not for me.’ You are looking at a commitment of seven years of training and a tremendous amount of money. We don’t want someone to get into it and be terribly unhappy.”
It was reassuring to see Porter Hospital behind the scenes and gain a deeper understanding of its inner functions. Often, modern institutionalized medicine can seem impersonal. People lose their identity when they put on an ascetic patient gown and are whisked down the white, antiseptic halls of a hospital. Their blood is drawn and sent off to basement labs for tests, their biopsies carted down to pathologists and their bodies placed under massive machines for images they may never see. But at Porter Hospital, I was able to witness the care and concern put into every step of a patient’s treatment by doctors, nurses and lab technicians alike. Such personal treatment is a benefit of having a rural hospital in a small community.
I encourage pre-med students and students unsure about medical school to apply to the Porter Internship next J-term. It was a valuable insight into careers in medicine, and the doctors and lab technicians I shadowed were all eager to teach and give advice. The application for the Porter Internship is made available late summer, and the deadline is early October.
(01/28/16 12:41am)
The College installed a charging station for electric vehicles (EVs) in the parking lot behind Proctor Dining Hall this Nov. The station is a level two charging station that can service two cars at once and charge an EV battery in three to six hours, depending on the EV model and other factors, such as temperature.
Director of Sustainability Integration Jack Byrne helped lead the initiative and said that the increased prevalence and practicality of electric cars made the charging station an important addition.
“We have at least five employees with all electric vehicles and it makes it much more convenient for them to charge their cars while at work when needed,” Byrne said. “It may help other employees in deciding if their next vehicles will be electric knowing that there is a place for them to charge it at work. It also will be used by alumni, parents and students who have EVs. We have had several requests from people in those groups in the past as well.”
The charging station’s installation was a yearlong effort that began in 2014. It was funded by the Environmental Council, which gives grants to student projects. In previous years they have funded the wind turbine at the recycling center, the solar decathlon houses, Earth Day events, the fermenter’s guild, and the organic farm’s initiative to raise chickens.
“The Environmental Council has a grant program that runs the entire academic year,” Byrne said. “People can propose any project that in the broadest sense moves the sustainability agenda forward at The College. They can propose anytime for up to $1,500. For bigger projects you can propose for up to $5,000. We have a deadline Jan. 31 and another Feb. 29. We are just receiving our first batch of them now. We seem to have fewer proposals this year than in previous years. So it’s a good year to propose because the odds are in your favor.”
Ali Cook ’16, who worked on the Environmental Council for two years, came up with the idea for the EV charging station and submitted the proposal to the grant committee.
“There was environmental and compact car parking behind Hillcrest, but we didn’t have a EV charging station,” Cook said. “ I thought this was strange because we try to promote a sustainable lifestyle for faculty and students. One day I overheard a parent on a guided tour exclaim ‘Middlebury doesn’t even have electric car parking!’ It was sort of embarrassing.”
Cook researched the logistics of installing an EV charging station and surveyed faculty and staff on whether they drove an EV, how long they commute and if having a charging station at the College would make a difference to them. The response was overwhelmingly positive. After the grant was approved, the Environmental Council had to find a space on campus, negotiate with Green Mountain Power, which has a EV charging station program, and get approval from the Space Committee.
Although the single EV charging station can only service two cars at once, it is an important first step in expanding the amount of EVs at the College.
“It’s a pilot project, and it’s symbolic, but the idea is that in the future Middlebury could have an all electric fleet, and public safety could drive electric cars,” Cook said.
Two major problems: EVs have battled with are range and charging time. But recent electric car models have started to change this: the Nissan Leaf, to be released in 2016, will be able to travel 107 miles on a single charge and the Tesla Model S can travel 208 miles. The number of electric charging stations across the country is also increasing. Vermont, for instance, has over 115 EV charging stations. One company, Better Place, is creating electric car charging stations that can switch out an EV battery autonomously on a conveyor belt and replace it with a new, fully charged battery in five minutes. The company has launched pilot programs in Israel and Denmark.
Electric cars will be an important part of our future, and as climate change becomes more urgent and oil dwindles, it will become increasingly necessary to make the transition from gas-powered cars. The EV charging station is a symbolic start, and it’s hopefully a sign of more EVs and charging stations to come.
(01/21/16 12:25am)
Distrust of scientific experts is widespread in the United States. It fuels the anti-vaccine, climate change denial and creationist movements, to name only a few of its most noticeable consequences. Why is there pervasive distrust, when is it justified and what can scientists do to combat it? The George Nye and Anne Walker Boardman Professor of Mental and Moral Science Heidi Grasswick explored these questions on Wednesday, Jan. 13 in a lecture titled “In Science We Trust! – Or Not? Developing a situated account of responsible trust in scientific experts.”
Grasswick began by exploring a number of cases of scientific distrust. A growing number of parents in the United States have stopped vaccinating their children after a now discredited report linked the MMR vaccine to autism, despite the reassurances of the medical and scientific communities. Close to 25 percent of Americans do not believe that global warming is real.
“Scientists are often surprised or dismayed when their work is met with distrust or rejection by members of the general public,” Grasswick said. “As far as they are concerned, they are engaged in the most robust form of knowledge generation available. They are the experts on their topics, and it seems to follow that non-experts should follow what they have to say. Furthermore, since sound policy making needs to based on sound science, it’s deeply worrisome that trust in science is not widespread.”
However, because the scientific community sometimes makes mistakes or acts irresponsibly, distrust can be warranted. For instance, during the Tuskegee syphilis experiment from 1932 to 1972, scientists studied the effects of untreated syphilis on hundreds of black men even after penicillin was discovered as a viable treatment. Thalidomide, a morning sickness drug, was given to tens of thousands of women during the 1950s, causing thousands of infants to be born with malformed limbs. Even the people most trusting of the scientific community often roll their eyes at trending diets and seemingly arbitrary nutrition suggestions.
“While widespread distrust in science is worrisome, what’s perhaps more worrisome is that epistemologically distrust in science can be understood to be well grounded,” Grasswick said. “Although scientists are rightly concerned about scientific distrust, they should be even more concerned that despite their best intentions, scientists are not always as trustworthy as they suppose. There may be times when people are too trusting. This is where my interest lies as an epistemologist.”
Grasswick then made a case for developing a better understanding of responsible trust and when and why the public should trust scientific experts. She explained that ideally, trust should match the trustworthiness of the provider, and that it is important to focus on what makes a provider trustworthy.
Some scientists and philosophers believe that the solution is the information deficient model, which claims that distrust will decrease when we increase scientific literacy, either by teaching people about specific scientific issues or about the scientific method. This way, the theory goes, people have enough knowledge to judge data and evidence and determine the trustworthiness of a source for themselves.
While Grasswick agreed that increasing scientific literacy is important, she noted that other forces are at play. Psychologists have long known about motivated reasoning, the idea that, given the same information, people with opposing ideologies will interpret data differently, searching for evidence that reaffirms their preexisting beliefs. Grasswick also pointed out that lack of knowledge does not necessarily cause distrust; rather, distrust can occur when the scientific community does not understand a group’s concerns.
Grasswick placed more importance on understanding the idea of a trustworthy testimony, and defined a few components of trustworthiness.
“Someone listening to a testimony will judge whether or not the expert is competent and sincere,” she said. “The sincerity requirement indicates a relationship between the speaker and the hearer, and an attitude toward the person with information. When the knowledge in question is significant to the hearer, the relationship must be more robust to support the depth and breadth of the person making themselves vulnerable.”
The idea of trustworthiness being interpersonal opens up the possibility that different populations could have varying levels of distrust based on their historical interactions with the scientific community. The experience of being marginalized or subordinated could contribute to the warranted distrust of a community. Therefore, it is the character of institutions, and not necessarily the quality of the knowledge they generate, that inspires trust from people.
Emphasizing that the purpose of her presentation was to raise important questions, Grasswick stressed that every issue differed from one another.
“It’s obvious to me that scientific literacy is not the simple solution, because trust in the information is not all that is required,” Grasswick said. “More attention needs to be paid to differences in situation, and whom we are trustworthy to. We need to think about the legacy of the injustices in the history of science. And we definitely need to make sure there are no more failures of trust, or keep their numbers down because they can do huge damage. It gives us one more reason why racism and sexism and other forms of prejudice need to be eliminated from the practice of science.”
(12/10/15 12:43am)
Dartmouth Professor of Biochemistry Jon Lull spoke last Friday, Dec. 4 about his research using fatty acids to treat cholera and other gastrointestinal bacterial diseases, which, combined, kill 100,000 people every year.
Cholera is caused by Vibrio cholerae bacteria and is spread through contaminated drinking water. Before the germ theory of disease, it was believed in Europe that Cholera was a “bad air” that emanated from rotting organic matter and made people sick. John Snow, a father of epidemiology, first discovered its real method of transmission when he mapped Cholera outbreaks in London and noticed their association with certain drinking wells (he also surprisingly found that it was safest to live in or near a brewery; bacteria can’t grow in beer and it was the safest thing to drink before basic sanitation).
Cholera is most prevalent in cities with poor sanitation and outbreaks often occur after natural disasters.
“Most of the time we don’t get it because we’re drinking purified drinking water,” Lull said. “But what happens sometimes, particularly in developing areas, if there’s a monsoon or a natural disaster or an earthquake like in Haiti, the water supply and sewage lines get mixed together and you can get a cholera outbreak.”
People in affected areas often have little access to antibiotics and can die from severe dehydration resulting from diarrhea. Jon Kull proposed a novel solution to treating Cholera: use natural products high in monosaturated fats like sea buckthorn and synthetic analogs of fatty acids. These chemicals would be a cheap substitute to antibiotics in areas without access to them. His decades long work on Cholera virulence proteins led him to discover that fatty acids can help prophylactically prevent Cholera.
Lull is a structural biologist and primarily researches the structures of proteins – the molecules that are the active workers of a cell and carry out its essential functions. When he first joined the faculty at Dartmouth, a colleague from the Darmouth Medical School approached him and asked him to find the structures of proteins in Cholera that make it toxic. Lull agreed (coincidently, he remembered that audience member Mary Lothrop, Middlebury’s CCI director of health profession advising, was his first researcher and worked with him when he began the project).
Lull’s most exciting results have come from studying the ToxT protein, the master regulator of Cholera toxicity. Not all cholera bacteria are pathogenic; they need to have insertions of two different packages of genes that lead to the deadly effects of cholera, and one of the insertions contains ToxT. ToxT regulates two important genes that make cholera deadly: the cholera toxin gene and the cholera toxin coregulated pilus structure.
"The cholera toxin gene is what actually makes you sick,” Lull said. “Your intestinal cells take it up and the cholera toxin causes ion transporters to open up and pump ions out into your intestine. Water follows and you die of massive dehydration in a couple of days.”
Jon Lull studied the ToxT protein and found its structure using a technique called X-ray crystallography. In X-ray crystallography, a protein is precipitated into a crystal and X-rays are directed at its crystal. The pattern by which light bounces off gives valuable information about a molecule’s structure. When he looked at the structure, he noticed something unexpected.
“What was very surprising was the presence of a small molecule tucked in a small pocket of the middle of the protein,” Lull said. “And I remember looking at it for the first time and thinking this can’t be an amino acid… it looks like a fatty acid. And sure enough it was. Like most surprises in science in retrospect it turned out to be not so much a surprise.”
He discovered that the fatty acid was palmitoleic acid. When the fatty acid is bound to ToxT, it has difficulty expressing the two deadly cholera toxin genes.
One night, during dinner with his wife, Lull came to a sudden realization about the implications of his discovery.
“It was one of those scientific epiphany moments and I said, ‘Oh my God, I know how to cure cholera’ – we give people fatty acids and this prevents them from getting cholera,” Lull said. “It seems obvious now, but no one had said that yet at this point.”
Lull has since experimented on using different monosaturated fats to prevent cholera. In one mouse study, control mice died on average 24 hours after being exposed to cholera. The treatment mice who prophylicatically received palmitoleic acid survived significantly longer than the control mice and were still alive after the conclusion of the experiment 48 hours after being infected.
Lull is currently pushing for clinical trials to treat patients with sea buckthorn, a plant produced in large amounts in China that is high in palmitoleic acid and working on creating synthetic chemicals that could be more effective than palmitoleic acid in treating Cholera. If his project comes to fruition, we could have a new drug in our arsenal to help prevent and treat cholera.
(10/07/15 11:31pm)
More than 400 people visited the observatory to watch the lunar eclipse. The eclipse coincided with a supermoon, a rare event that only happens once every twenty years. The roof deck telescopes were open and looked at Saturn, the moon and the Hercules globular cluster of stars – an ancient group of 300,000 stars estimated to be 11 billion years old. As the moon passed through the shadow of the earth and its light began to dim, the stars and the Milky Way began to shine brightly.
The crowd at the observatory demonstrates the continuing appeal of astronomy at Middlebury. It’s fun to gaze up at the gem-like twinkling stars, draw patterns in the sky, and to use the telescopes to see incredible clusters of stars, nebulae, and other stellar objects invisible to the naked eye. It’s also important to understand our origins and contemplate our place in the cosmos. Astronomy should be an integral part of a liberal arts education, and fortunately at Middlebury the discipline continues to grow. This year the College upgraded its 24-inch telescope, which is located in the Bihall observatory dome, and students formed a new space club.
The 24-inch telescope is the centerpiece of the observatory. It is used during public observation events and the labs of the Introduction to the Universe course. Physics majors also use it for research. Jonathan Kemp is the head of the College’s observatory and was in charge of implementing the telescope upgrades.
“These upgrades will substantially enhance our capabilities,” Kemp said. “This summer, over an accelerated schedule, we made four major types of upgrades. We upgraded the telescope itself, the dome, the scientific instrumentation, and re-aluminated the primary and secondary mirrors of the telescope.”
Most telescopes including the College’s have two main mirrors that work together to magnify light and direct it into the eye piece. The mirrors are made of glass and coated with a thin layer of aluminum. One of the main objectives of the upgrades was to clean the mirrors and re-coat them with aluminum.
“Basically the mirrors had never been re-aluminized,” Kemp said. “By definition of being exposed to the elements the surface optical components will slowly degrade, so it was time. Just by looking at the pictures and images we definitely have much more throughput with the mirror now.”
When they began the telescope upgrades they also discovered an unexpected interference.
“When we removed the mirror we found that there was a feather that had gotten stuck to the mirror, which was interesting,” Kemp said.
Kemp replaced the 15 year old CCD cameras used for imaging stellar objects with new cameras, updated the software, and added a remotely controlled cover to the telescope. Other small changes were made to the telescopes that facilitate the use of the telescope.
The 24-inch telescope will be available for physics majors to do senior research, and will give them an opportunity for hands on experience trouble-shooting professional telescopes. Although Assistant Professor of Physics Professor Glickman does research on Quasars, faint and distant black holes emitting light, and requires more powerful telescopes, Jonathan’s research focuses on cataclysmic variable stars.
“I think that’s something that students here will be able to get involved with at a greater degree, and students can produce publication quality results,” Jonathan said. “So it’s just a matter of finding the right science and the right targets suitable for this telescope. In this case we don’t have a large mirror size, but we do have a lot of access, which helps with variable star studies where you study timing. “
If students want to get involved in astronomy they can either take Professor Glickman’s Introduction to the Universe course or attend observatory events. This Friday, Oct. 9th, there will be an open house from 8:00-9:30 p.m. Students can also join the new Space Club on Campus.
Ben Belinski ’18.5, Haruna Takeda ’18, Roo Weed ’18.5 and Alex Wells ’18 started the space club this semester. The four are long-time space enthusiasts, and when they arrived at the College they noticed the lack of a student club devoted to space.
“We realized there wasn’t really any space club on campus and thought that was a niche that really needed to be filled,” Weed said. “There’s just not much of an outlet for space or astronomy, which is crazy because we have such an amazing facility for it. We decided we wanted to see more of it on Campus. People are really enthusiastic. That’s the best part. People are very supportive of it.”
The club’s plan is to be a platform for holding discussions and advertising events. They want to bring a greater awareness of astronomy to students and give an outlet to students enthusiastic about space. So far they’ve organized a trip to see the movie the Martian, and held a space table at the lunar eclipse event. They have many ideas for the future.
“We’re taking a low-commitment, less formal approach to it because we want to have a large audience, and the entire reason we started this club was for fun,” Belinski said. “It’s intended that people can drop in whenever they want to. We’re going to start a reading group so that people can talk about different space issues and mind-blowing concepts that people like to work through and discuss together.”
One of their projects is to get support for an astronomy major.
“No one believes students want this major,” Weed said. “So we’re going to try and use our email list to try and get support for a major at least as a first step to indicate that students are interested in a major.”
In addition to being fun, the students agreed astronomy is an important part of a liberal arts education.
“I think having a space club, having some sort of education about the cosmos, is really important. Every time I learn something new about astronomy it opens your perspective in a whole new way. What is so amazing to us is how little people know and understand about what is beyond our own narrow world. It’s so important, it’s maybe the most important thing,” Weed said.
The group hopes to gain official approval this fall. To sign up for the space club students can email the group at middspaceclub@gmail.com.
(09/24/15 1:17am)
The first Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival (MNFF) was held this summer and ran from August 27-30. MNFF is tailored for new filmmakers, the underdogs of the film industry. The festival only accepts the first and second films of new filmmakers. MNFF received over 300 film submissions, of which 90 were shown. The films represented 15 countries, and Middlebury alumni produced five of the films.
It’s difficult for new filmmakers with limited resources and connections to break into the film industry, and the festival’s aim is to increase their exposure. Kyla Jarret ’14 was one of the principal organizers of MNFF and thought that its success was due to finding an important untapped niche.
“We were told that the standard number of films submitted to a new film festival is about 100, but we received over 300,” Jarret said. “We discovered that we hit a groove that other people hadn’t thought of, and that we appealed to more people than we anticipated. Other film festivals don’t take any time for new filmmakers, and our goal was the opposite of that, to try and make it about the filmmakers. We were bogged down by submissions.”
The first MNFF was the result of more than 18 months of planning. Lloyd Komesar, a former distribution executive at Walt Disney, is the head of MNFF and came up with the idea for the festival.
“I volunteered at the first Pasadena festival in California,” Komesar said. “Several of the films were by first time film-makers, and I thought that was a good element. It struck me that it’s hard for new filmmakers to get recognition because they’re mixed in with established filmmakers. I thought why don’t we dedicate a festival to completely new filmmakers, so that they’re competing on with folks at the same stage?”
Komesar spends half the year in Middlebury and thought its strong cultural base with the Town Hall Theater and the College was ideal for a film festival. Middlebury’s rural location proved to be both an asset and, at times, a challenge. Most problematic was the transportation and housing of filmmakers. More than 40 filmmakers attended the event, and they were placed with local families. But Phoebe Lewis, the Press Associate of MNFF, thought that the size and remoteness of Middlebury was important for the event’s success.
“I would say there were more benefits to holding a festival in Vermont than drawbacks,” Lewis said. “The community really came alive and gave the festival that extra spark. It was the biggest perk of creating a film festival in such a small area, and I can confidently say that without the amazing Middlebury community and their incredible support, this event would not have been nearly as energetic and memorable as it was.”
Films were shown in Dana Auditorium, the Marquette Theater and the Town Hall Theater. Four feature films and seven short films won the festival’s VTeddy award. Winners received a Vermont teddy bear and will be taken on a New England circuit and shown in theaters in each New England state.
Jay Craven was the artistic director of the festival. Craven is an independent filmmaker based in Vermont and has shown his films in over 1,000 towns across the state. He was in charge of film submission screening. The only requisite for film submission was that the films were first or second films of new filmmakers. The movies spanned multiple genres including documentary, drama, animation, horror and comedy.
One of the award winning films, Sound and the Shadow, is about an eccentric recluse that secretly records his neighborhood. He’s brought out of isolation by his neighbor, who urges him to use his audio documentation to help solve the disappearance of a girl in the neighborhood.
“The Sound and the Shadow is an interesting concept and an incredibly powerful film,” Jarret said. “That’s what would astound me about these first time filmmakers, is that they would present the most complete projects. Color correcting is even perfect on this film.”
Another award-winning film, My Gal, Rosemarie, follows a day in the life of Rosemarie and Ray. Barely able to subsist on social security checks, the two collect cans to save up money for Rosemarie’s 90th birthday wish to go to In-N-Out for hamburgers.
The Sound and Shadow, My Gal, Rosmerie, and the short film Stunned will all be shown at the Town Hall Theater on Oct. 6 at 7 p.m. for an admission price of $10. This Tuesday, Sept. 29, three documentaries including the award winning film Omo Child: the Sound and the River will be shown at 7 p.m. at the Town Hall Theater.
Komesar hopes the festival will continue strong into the future and provide an important venue for aspiring new filmmakers.
“What we can do here is create a festival with recognition where quality new filmmakers show their films. I don’t know that there are other festivals that do this in a concrete way. It’s something we feel strongly about. There will always be new filmmakers, and we feel like they need a break.”
(04/29/15 9:07pm)
Despite the polarization of politics, Republicans and Democrats continue to unite on at least one issue: National Institute of Health, or NIH, funding. I was pleasantly surprised by Newt Gingrich’s Op-Ed, “Double the NIH Budget” in the New York Times last Wednesday, in which he argued in favor of raising the NIH budget to 60 billion dollars because investment in biomedical breakthroughs would offset future health costs.
Other Republicans have also rallied around the cause of NIH funding. Presidential candidate Jeb Bush, former House Majority leader Eric Cantor and self-identified Tea Party member Matt Salmon, U.S. Representative for the 5th district of Arizona, have all enthusiastically called for increases in the NIH budget.
There are several reasons for the recent upwelling of political support. NIH funding is politically low hanging fruit; it looks good on a candidate’s resume, and no representative wants to oppose finding cures for disease. Health resonates with everyone because it is personal. The Tea Party Representative Matt Salmon explained why he supported NIH funding, saying, “As a conservative Republican,
I believe the fiscal health of our nation is one of the most critical issues long term. But I want to fight this fight, I’ve lost too many friends to cancer, and I don’t want to see another person succumb to this.”
I’m cautiously optimistic about the future of the NIH. Although its funding has stagnated for the past 10 years, and it’s easy to pay lip-service to biomedical funding without actual action, there appears to be a genuine growing push to increase its funding.
I think increasing NIH funding is important and should be celebrated, but I’m not as confident as these politicians that it’s the panacea for all our health woes. They present a politically convenient but oversimplified vision for improving American health care, ignoring many nuances. In particular, we have to address ballooning health costs, increase funding for other scientific disciplines and fix systemic flaws within the NIH.
The United States already spends 15 percent of its GDP (roughly the GDP of France) on health care, and by 2020 healthcare expenditures are expected to increase to 4.6 trillion dollars. The main drivers behind increasing healthcare costs are an aging U.S population and increasing drug and medical device prices. I hope Newt Gingrich is right, and that new drugs will lower healthcare costs by finding cures for ailments that are currently expensive to treat. It’s also possible that biomedical research will only lead to new, expensive devices and drugs that only marginally increase life expectancy while driving up health care expenditures to the detriment of other important causes. We have to make sure that new medicine not only increases our life expectancy, but is also affordable. With an aging society, we have tough decisions ahead about how much money we are to spend on age-related illnesses and end-of-life care.
While biomedical research has undoubtedly contributed to the increase in life expectancy from 70 years to 80 years in the past half-century, advances in medicine have also come from basic research in other scientific fields. Physicists gave us medical imaging and radiology, engineers gave us prosthetics and medical devices and computer scientists have given us electronic medical records and bioinformatics, to name a few examples. But despite the importance of these other fields in regard to medicine (not to mention all their other applications), their funding has lagged in the recent decades. National Science Foundation funding has stagnated around 8 billion dollars, and since 1996, mathematics, the physical sciences, engineering and computer science have all seen a decrease in their share of academic research and development funding. Congress shouldn’t just focus on the NIH to the detriment of other basic sciences.
Systemic problems within the biomedical research community also exist, which won’t be solved by increasing funding. An environment of hypercompetition exists where scientists are having a harder time funding their research and grant success rates hover around 20 percent. Only 15 percent of postdoctoral researchers are able to find a tenure-track position within six years.
Hypercompetition has negative consequences and has harmed the research community. Less bold and creative ideas are funded because scientists and grant-review panels are more likely to stick to old, less risky ideas that have worked in the past. Scientists rush to publish in prestigious journals like Nature and Science because it means a greater likelihood of getting grant money in the future and evidence shows that in recent years this has led to greater fabrication of evidence and the cutting of corners. There were almost ten times as many retractions in 2010 as there were in 2000. In a competitive environment, scientists are also less likely to work together for fear of getting scooped, and scientific progress becomes slower.
Increasing funding wouldn’t solve the problems that lead to hypercompetition. The doubling of the NIH budget from 1998 to 2002 did little to stop the plummet in grant success rates. The best way to fix the problem is to limit the number of biomedical graduate students and postdocs in the United States. Currently, labs train more graduate students and postdocs then there are research jobs because they lead to greater publication output. But this Malthusian system leads to too many people competing for a limited number of job openings. Instead, permanent staff scientists could replace many graduate students in labs. Larger labs would be forced to shrink, and grant funding would become less competitive and be distributed to more projects.
Fixing biomedical funding doesn’t just concern the community of biomedical researchers; it is an issue we should all be concerned with because it ultimately determines the quality of biomedical research output. The United States has led the way for cures in the past, and it’s in our best interest to support a strong biomedical research community so we can continue to make headway in improving our nation’s health.
(04/08/15 3:33pm)
Young river birches line McCardell Bicentennial Hall’s Walk of Science, which leads up to one of the building’s second floor entrances. Of the ten famous scientists whose names are engraved into the path’s black tiles, conspicuously, only one – Marie Curie – is female.
The Walk of Science is a stark reminder that not too long ago, women were almost completely excluded from the scientific community. Women faced deeply embedded misogyny, cultural discouragement and stifling gender norms.
Noble Laureate Elizabeth Blackburn tells the all-too-familiar story that when she mentioned her intent to pursue a degree in science to a family friend, the response was, “What’s a nice girl like you doing studying science?”
We often like to think the scientific community has moved beyond anachronistic and prejudicial attitudes toward women, and that our culture celebrates ambitious women pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). But a large body of evidence points to a darker reality. Progress has been made, but it would be preemptive to congratulate ourselves.
Women remain underrepresented in STEM, and make up only 24 percent of the STEM workforce. In one study, hiring managers were given two copies of the same resume, one with a female name and another with a male name: the hiring managers were less likely to pick the female resume.
Researchers also talk about the persistent “leaky pipeline problem.” Although in many STEM fields a slim majority of undergraduates are women, each progressive stage of training is more male and ultimately only a minority of tenured professors are women. For example, in biology, 52 percent of biology Ph.D.s are women, but only 18 percent are tenured professors.
Scholars list a variety of reasons why women are underrepresented in STEM fields, including discrimination, socialization and gender norms, the demands of child rearing, institutional bias and cultural discouragement as the major proffered factors. A full treatment of the topic is beyond the scope of this article, but recently a new group at the College was formed to discuss these issues and many others that are relevant to women interested in pursuing STEM careers.
The new student club, Women in STEM, was approved by the Constitution Committee last J-term and had its first meeting three weeks ago. Amanda Fishbin ’16 and Perri Silverhart ’16.5, two of the club’s founders, were encouraged to start the club by Professor of Geology Pat Manley.
“The idea of Women in STEM grew out of a few conversations with Pat Manly, who is our advisor and the only female faculty in the department,” Silverhart said. “She’s been in the field since women were first getting into the sciences, and she had a lot of interesting insights about being a woman in a STEM field that we had never thought about much before. She brought up so many different potential topics of conversation that we could use.”
A major focus of Women in STEM will be to foster relationships between female faculty and students, and to stimulate conversations about pursuing STEM careers.
“Female faculty have a variety of stories to share about how they ended up where they are and what their decision making process was along the way,” Silverhart said. “Getting a degree in STEM is one thing, but to actually pursue a career is less common than one might think. Students could also pursue networking opportunities through these relationships.”
Women in STEM recently helped fund Nobel Laureate Carol Greider’s visit to the College, and the group plans on inviting other prominent female scientists to speak on campus in the future. Silverhart would also like to set up a mentorship program with young girls attending elementary school.
“I’ve spoken with the principal of the Weybridge Elementary School and I know she’s interested in starting a program,” Silverhart said. “Ideally we’d set up one-on-one mentorship relationships and do fun, age appropriate introductions to science.”
The group will hopefully prompt discussions about the status of women in science. Silverhart mentioned it is important because women can still face challenges entering STEM fields.
“Part of the reason why I think it’s so important to have these conversations at Midd because sometimes at Midd we live in a bubble,” she said. “Here I feel on a completely equal playing field to my male colleagues in the classroom, and I don’t really notice any institutional bias, but when you look at studies in the real world that bias is very much present.”
The group plans on holding club elections and inviting faculty members to speak at their next meeting on Tuesday, April 14 at 12:30 p.m. in McCardell Bicentennial Hall 104.
(03/18/15 1:56pm)
Nobel Laureate Carol Greider gave a lecture last week on how she helped solve one of molecular biology’s fundamental mysteries: why are germ cell lines immortal?
In the 1960s, biologist Leonard Hayflick noticed that adult human cells in a Petri dish can only divide 40 to 60 times until they stop growing. This discovery uncovered a paradox: we are all products of cell lineages that go back millions of years and cell divisions, but our adult cells can only divide a limited number of times. How do germ cells, which are the reproductive cells passed on by parents, reset this ticking biological clock?
Carol Greider discovered the answer in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley while working in the lab of Elizabeth Blackburn, who shares her Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Just before Greider’s arrival, Elizabeth Blackburn had discovered an important genetic element called telomeres.
Telomeres are protective sequences of DNA at the end of our chromosomes. Due to the peculiarities of DNA replication, the ends of chromosomes shorten every time they are replicated. Telomeres are a non-coding buffer zone; when chromosomes shorten, telomeres are whittled away instead of important genes. Telomeres also attract important binding proteins that prevent the ends of different chromosomes from joining, and stop harmful DNA enzymes from digesting DNA. Just as shoelaces begin to fray when their plastic tips fall off, chromosomes begin to decay when their telomeres shorten.
Elizabeth Blackburn’s observation explained why adult cells have a limited number of cell divisions: their chromosomes shorten and their telomeres disappear. But how are germ cells able to regenerate their telomeres and pass on healthy telomere fortified DNA to their offspring?
Greider hypothesized that there was an enzyme capable of elongating telomeres in germ cells. She investigated the elongation mechanism with the model organism Tetrahymena, a single-celled animal from the protazoa kingdom. To search for the enzyme she collected extracts from the cells, and added them to artificial telomere sequences (repeating TTGGGG nucleotide bases) to see if they were elongated.
“After about nine months of trying variations on experiments, we found our first strong evidence for telomere elongation,” Greider said. “An 18 nucleotide telomere ‘seed’ was elongated with a repeated sequence that was six bases long – precisely the length of the TTGGGG telomere repeat in Tetrahymena. Now we had a biochemical assay that we could use to determine if this was a new telomere elongation mechanism.”
Next Greider hunted for the telomere elongating protein’s gene and for its mechanism. She suspected it used DNA’s relative, RNA, as a template to extend the telomere ends. She added RNA degrading enzymes to the protein extract and tried her experiment again: the telomeres didn’t extend.
“The RNA experiments indicated that activity was eliminated when RNA was degraded, implything there was an RNA component,” Greider said. “Liz and I felt that the best way to really show that an RNA was involved was to find the actual RNA. So I went into the cold room to try and purify the enzyme.”
After several years of work at UC Berkeley and at a fellowship at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, NY, Greider discovered the structure of the telomere enzyme, its gene and its mechanism. For this she was awarded the Noble Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009.
Greider named the telomere elongating enzyme telomerase, an unusual name for an enzyme.
“We first called the activity we identified ‘telomere terminal transferase’ because it was transferred telomere sequences into termini, but later shortened it to ‘Telomerase,’” wrote Greider in her biography on the official Nobel Prize website. “My friend and fellow student Clair Wyman and I would joke around in the lab a lot. Claire pointed out the name was too long and suggested various humorous names as alternatives. Names were further discussed later that night over a few beers and telomerase was one Claire had proposed initially as a joke. She thought it was funny, but Liz and I both liked it.”
Greider verified her discovery of telomeres and telomerase through experiments with telomerase deficient mice. She created a telomerase “knock-out” version of mice in which they lacked the enzyme telomerase. The mice were able to develop and have offspring normally for the first four generations, but the fifth and sixth generations of mice had growth defects. The sixth generation was completely sterile. The results aligned with her theory. The telomeres of the mouse reproductive cells diminished in each passing generation, until they were too short and their genetic information was damaged. When she mated the fifth generation mice with control mice so that their offspring would have a version of the telomerase gene, the sixth generation of mice was able to regenerate their telomeres. The experiment neatly summarized her decades-long and Noble Prize-winning work on telomerase.
The College is fortunate to have hosted several excellent lecturers this year, including two noble laureates. It is incredible not only to learn about their discoveries, but also to see the people behind the science and hear the stories that led them to their insights.
(03/04/15 4:28pm)
This year’s class of ’88 lecture series speaker Hugh Taylor addressed the question, “Will Stem Cells Stop the Biologic Clock?” The Yale School of Medicine physician-scientist and editor-in-chief of the Reproductive Sciences journal interspersed the story of his stem cell biology research with the hopeful prediction that stem cells could revolutionize our treatment of disease and biological aging.
Stem cells are the liberal arts student equivalent of cell types: they haven’t yet decided what cell form to take. As blank slates, they are capable of dividing and differentiating into almost any cell type in the body. As many diseases are caused by cell decay and death, these undifferentiated cells are promising to scientists in their potential to regenerate tissues and restore normal function.
The most infamous stem cells are embryonic stem cells, which are extracted from days-old embryos. But adult stem cell reservoirs are also found naturally in the body and replenish tissues as they lose their cells due to trauma or decay.
Hugh Taylor’s research revolves around endometrial stem cells, or stem cells found in the lining of the uterus. Taylor was first inspired to begin work with stem cells after seeing many patients struggle with infertility. Stem cell therapy struck him as a bright possibility.
“Infertility is a huge problem. By age 45, most women are unable to have children,” Taylor said. “That’s the concept that we’re born with most of the eggs we’re going to have and we start to lose them. But the ability of us to identify stem cells could help us stop this biological clock and extend the reproductive lifespan – if we could do this, it could have tremendous implications for society.”
Taylor also works on using endometrial stem cells to treat diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, a neuromuscular degenerative disorder, and Type I diabetes. Although other scientists have done research with embryonic and other adult stem cell types, Taylor finds endometrial stem cells promising because of their accessibility and abundance.
“Some of these cells are shed in menstrual flow,” Taylor said. “Someone could collect their menses and store them as a source of stem cells. Not as great a yield as a biopsy, but much easier. And we’ve been able to sort cells using certain markers, and we can pull out from menstrual debris and use them to create other cell types.”
Taylor placed endometrial stem cells into cultures of insulin secreting cells, allowed them to differentiate in response to their environment and then injected them into mice unable to produce their own insulin. To his surprise, the mice gained better control over their blood glucose levels.
“Not only did the cells make insulin, but they made insulin in a glucose-responsive fashion, just like we wanted,” Taylor said.
Taylor also discovered that endometrial stem cells could be reprogrammed to differentiate into nerve cells when in a culture with other cells. By injecting reprogrammed endometrial stem cells into mice, he found that they localized to the brain and increased dopamine levels. Dopamine-producing cells die in Parkinson’s disease, but Taylor hopes that stem cells could be used in the future to mitigate its symptoms.
As stem cell therapy is still in its early stages, it has not yet led to any direct medical applications – but Taylor’s work represents an important step on the path to future clinical treatments. His findings highlight the astounding and accelerating world of regenerative medicine, and embodies one of futurist and science writer Arthur C. Clarke’s famous laws: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Indeed, it is truly incredible to contemplate that the key to regenerating failing tissues and healing the body could lie in the budding field of stem cell biology.
(11/20/14 12:04am)
Lawyers are expensive, and many Americans can’t afford quality legal representation. Last Friday, Nov. 14, Vermont Law School Professors Oliver Goodenough and Jeannette Eicks gave a lecture called “Computer Science and Social Justice” about applying recent advances in computer science to the legal system that reduce legal costs, extend fair access to the law and improve social justice. They presented solutions that ranged from streamlining contracts to replacing many lawyers through the automation of mundane legal tasks, and both professors were optimistic about the changes information technology could make to the legal system.
Goodenough began by describing the current legal system’s costly inefficiencies and failure to provide social justice. He likened legal representation to expensive tailor-made suits that most people can’t afford.
“Essentially, you take every project on as something brand new, you do it from the ground up and you charge your clients accordingly,” he said. “On one hand it’s lovely. It’d be great if everyone in this room could afford to have a hand-made, tailored suit, but who can? That’s why we have industrial, scaled up processes for providing clothing, and they’re perfectly adequate. Law is changing in the same kind of way under the pressure that we just can’t make this system work anymore, and it’s not delivering social justice.”
Goodenough mentioned a few of the problems endemic to our legal system. Lawyers are often paid by the hour and are not incentivized to work with efficiency. Additionally, the law is written in a form difficult to understand and lacks sophisticated interface design and visualization. Goodenough was part of a panel that met at the Association of Chief Justices in the United States, and he found large support among them for his ideas.
“The chief justices got the fact that the system was broken,” he said. “They see every day the fact that folks are not getting the outcomes and access they need from the law. We had 35 chief justices in the audience, and they were receptive of the notion we need to do this better.”
The lecturers then launched into several examples of legal computation in action. One program, A2J, addresses the need for representation in divorce cases. Eicks mentioned that in Vermont, 50 percent of divorces have no lawyers, and that it takes, on average, two to three years to get a divorce. A team at the Chicago Kent School of Law designed a user-friendly program that takes its clients through a list of legal questions traditionally asked by lawyers. At the end, the client can print out a document and present an assembly of most of the necessary information to a judge without having to consult a lawyer.
Another app, Shake Law, enables people to create, sign and send legally binding contracts without a lawyer. The company presents itself in contrast with traditional law practices.
“We believe that the legal market is huge, inefficient, underserved by technology and begging for change, and we are driven by what legal transactions can and will be, not what they have been historically,” the company’s website advertises.
Eicks discussed some of the benefits of Shake Law.
“You can sit down in a cafe and talk about terms,” said Eicks. “This works if you need a creative license agreement or a programming agreement or a nondisclosure agreement. Shake Law tracks it for you in the cloud, and you call it up whenever you want to. If a neutral third party can maintain this, lawyers are out of the picture.”
Finally, Goodenough talked about the implications for this technology in litigations and legal battles. In many lawsuits there is a disparity in legal resources between the two sides. For instance, corporations can normally afford better representation than the people suing them. Increasingly, however, computation is used to prepare cases.
“This is a great leveler,” he said. “Software can be used to organize and analyze evidence and pick out the most important documents to use.”
The Vermont Law Clinic, which serves low-income Vermont residents unable to afford legal representation, was able to win several cases against trained law firms using this software.
Computation is impacting and disrupting more and more professions, even ones we don’t typically associate with computer science. Goodenough and Eicks emphasized that there are many legal applications for computer science, highlighting some of the big, hopefully positive changes that the future holds for our legal system.
(11/06/14 2:42am)
Last year Heather Dewey-Hagborg became the world’s first DNA portrait artist. For her controversial art project Stranger Visions, she collected genetic detritus such as hair, cigarette butt saliva and sequenced portions of DNA from skin cells on the streets of New York City. After uploading the genetic data into a face-generating computer program, Hagborg created life-like masks with a 3D printer and put them on display.
The purpose of the piece was to provoke discussion on the potential uses and abuses of genetic information. “I had never considered the emerging possibility of genetic surveillance,” Hagborg explained. “The very things that make us human like hair, skin and saliva become a liability as we constantly face the possibility of shedding these traces in public space, leaving artifacts which anyone could come along and mine for information.” Although she couldn’t compare her attempts to real faces because the DNA was taken from strangers, she used her methods on herself and a few volunteers. The faces are similar, but by no means perfect matches, and some geneticists pointed out that it will still be years before the technology and our understanding of the genetics are sophisticated enough to use in forensic investigations.
But the artwork still potently illustrates how in the coming decades humans will have to make many hard decisions. In just the past decade there’s been a sudden and mostly unexpected exponentiation of DNA sequencing speed and drop-in cost. The first human genome was finished in 2004 at roughly the cost of $3 billion. One decade later the biotech company Illumina announced the first commercially available $1,000 genome. Genetic sequencing has advanced quicker than Moore’s Law. In the ten years since the genome was first sequenced, DNA base pair per dollar cost has increased tenfold per year, compared to a 1.5 fold increase in computer processing speed per year. The $1,000 genome represents a momentous milestone. Many geneticists herald it as the dawn of an age of personalized medicine, and believe that in the future everyone will have their genomes sequenced. We’ve passed a genetic watershed mark, and things are only speeding up. Will we use our newfound ability to read and write DNA for good, or will there be unintended negative consequences of the genetic revolution?
In an effort to improve our understanding of the flood of genetic information, numerous projects have been launched. Last year the U.K. announced a project to sequence the genomes of 100,000 individuals by 2019, focusing on people with rare diseases and cancer. The hope is to discover the genetic mutations responsible for their diseases, which will contribute to drug development and targeted therapies. China’s Beijing Genomics institute (BGI) has a quarter of the world’s sequencing ability, and has already sequenced 53,000 people. It recently launched the Cognitive Genomics Lab to investigate human neurogenetics. Their website says the lab is “recruiting subjects” and exhorts “If you are cognitively gifted, we encourage you to participate!” Their volunteer page further specifies the requirements. Applicants must have “An SAT score of at least 760 verbal/800 math” and “a PhD from a top U.S. program in physics math, electrical engineering, or theoretical computer science.” BGI and the U.K. genome project are just two of numerous bioinformatics projects aimed at decoding the significance of our genes.
Our sequencing capability, understanding of genetics and competence with biotechnology are growing exponentially. We will have to confront discomforting and divisive bioethical issues with greater frequency and consequence. Since the 1960’s, a parade of issues has passed before the public. First debate raged over in vitro fertilization, birth control and genetic recombination technology. Today these technologies are commonplace and carry little stigma. More recently, conflict has arisen over topics such as GM crops, cloning, preimplantation genetic screening, stem cell research, synthetic biology, genetic surveillance, bioterrorism and gene therapy. In our lifetimes there will be a new host of graver issues to address.
People are already divided on these issues. There are bioconservatives and technophiles, libertarians and statists, the religious and the secular. These issues elicit strong reactions and emotions because they challenge our notions of what is sacred, what is natural and what is human. If bioethical debates only get more vitriolic in the future, we need to better discuss the coming changes and advances and improve our ability to make decisions about what to allow, regulate or prohibit.
Unfortunately, it takes time for ideas to percolate through society, and scientific advances are often unveiled on short notice. Technology is advancing at an exponential rate, and we have relatively less time to discuss more consequential issues. Most dishearteningly, our democracy appears to have lost its ability to make collective decisions. As Middlebury students we have a responsibility to facilitate this discussion. This is a task not just for the scientifically inclined. Artists can explore our emotional reactions to these advances, political scientists our policies toward them and economists our economic systems that drive them. Scientists should not only dedicate themselves to good research, but also to understanding the implications of their research and communicating it to the public. I’m optimistic about the benefits of the genetic revolution and excited about future treatments and cures. But we need to get better at discussing and deciding these ethical questions if we are to safely navigate the future of this technology.
(10/22/14 10:47pm)
Nobel laureate and Columbia University Professor of Biological Sciences Martin Chalfie visited the College last Thursday, Oct. 16 to give two lectures. One talk focused on his research on the green fluorescent protein (GFP), which earned him the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and the other on his current work on the molecular basis of the sense of touch.
In his first lecture, “GFP: Lighting Up Light,” Chalfie recounted the story of GFP’s discovery with humor, humility, and advice for aspiring scientists. Chalfie described GFP as a biochemical lantern and homing beacon that enables molecular biologists to watch the movement of proteins in living cells and organisms. Chalfie gave several specific examples of GFP’s use, including how scientists had used it to track the movement of viruses from cell to cell, the metastasis of cancer and the division of cells during embryonic development. There have been close to 160,000 published papers citing GFP.
The story of GFP began with the life of Chalfie’s Nobel co-laureate Osamu Shimomura. Shimomura, who was the first scientist to isolate GFP, followed an unconventional path to his life in science. When Shimomura was sixteen years old he dropped out of school to work in a paint factory to support his family. He moved from Nagasaki, Japan to a valley close to the city in 1945, fortuitously avoiding the blast of the atomic bomb. Shimomura decided to matriculate into the first college rebuilt in Nagasaki, which happened to be a pharmaceutical school.
Shimomura successfully isolated GFP in a marine biology lab, but when he attempted to illuminate the isolated GFP, it wouldn’t light up.
Chalfie explained, “This is where we depart from the scientific method and the standard story about science, because the experiment failed every single time he did it the entire summer. Nothing worked. One night near the end of the summer, he decided to go home because he’d failed once again. He took his prep, threw it in the sink and turned off the light. As he was about to leave the lab he looked back and found that it was glowing brightly. “I want to point out that in biochemistry throwing things in the sink or on the floor or the lab bench is often a very good procedure.”
It turns out that seawater has several important chemicals that enable GFP’s function.
Chalfie first heard about Shimomura’s work in 1989 at a lecture and immediately realized its potential importance. Chalfie worked on incorporating GFP into cells and fusing it to proteins, and in 1993 his work on GFP was on the cover of Science. Soon after, the scientific community embraced GFP as a powerful research tool.
Chalfie thought the story of GFP illustrated the cumulative, collaborative nature of science.
“Scientific progress isn’t something made by one great genius, but a cumulative effort, we as scientists take up ideas of others, modify them by our own experiments, and give them off to others,” he said. “What made GFP Nobel-worthy was not the work of the three of us, but the work of the thousands of people who made it a useful tool.”
Chalfie ended the talk by emphasizing the importance of funding basic research.
“Columbia gave me the freedom to do the experiments I wanted to do. I didn’t have to ask for permission or write a grant to do work on GFP. People outside of science misunderstand when we talk about the grant system. Grants are different from contract. They give you the freedom to go where the science leads you and not be tied up to a contractual obligation. I have found this to be very important, and it was really the only reason we were able to do the work on GFP that ended up working.”
Chalfie’s current work is focused largely on the sense of touch. Scientists largely understand the senses that are prompted by light, like sight, and chemical signaling, like taste and smell, but don’t understand how mechanical signals translate into touch sensation. Chalfie discovered that there are 17 important genes in the mechanosensory system and mapped their relationships with one another. He used them to investigate important questions in the field, including how we habituate touch and how we sense touch so rapidly.
When asked how the winning the Nobel Prize had changed his life, he said, “The first thing is that I get invited to give more talks like this. Before the Nobel, I never had the chance to give a general talk about science and how I thought GFP fit into it. This has given me a platform for me to do that. I’ve been able to interact much more with students. Eight months after the Nobel my niece’s daughter took me into class for show and tell, which was quite nice.”
(09/24/14 2:28pm)
In early November, the Rosetta space mission will land on a comet. Arguably as momentous as putting a rover on Mars or a man on the Moon, this space expedition also gets my vote as the coolest to date.
I say this because the comet in question, 67P/Cheryumov-Gerasimenko, is moving 85,000 miles per hour and is almost a quarter of the size of Manhattan. Rosetta was launched in 2004 and took ten years to reach the comet. It followed an intricate trajectory that included four gravitational slingshots by Earth and Mars. The complexity and precision of the mission’s ballistics is mind-boggling, and makes me feel all the more insecure about my inability to accurately throw crumpled paper into a waste bin.
But the destination is more astounding than the journey. Astronomers describe comets as dirty snowballs composed of ice, dust, and rock hurling through space. They have a thin atmosphere and a characteristic, colorful tail because solar winds vaporize comet ice. Debris constantly breaks off from the comet and when the earth passes through a comet’s tail, the debris disburses in the atmosphere, causing a meteor shower. Comets are thought to originate from the Kuiper belt, a field of comets and asteroids just outside the orbit of Pluto, and from the Oort cloud, a surrounding jumble of icy objects that extends halfway to the nearest star.
Most exciting is that during the subsequent months after touchdown, the mission will relay data that will contribute to our understanding of the formation of the solar system and the origin of life.
Comets are thought to be among the most primitive objects in the solar system and leftover fragments from its formation. Rosetta project scientist Claudia Alexander explains, “Comets come from a distant place in space, and because of this we think they represent pristine, unchanged remnants of the distant past … comets present a unique ‘archeological dig’ opportunity.”
Rosetta rendezvoused with the comet in August and is currently orbiting and approaching it. In November it will be close enough to drop its lander, Philae, onto the comet. Philae is equipped with 11 instruments, and if all goes well it will start experimenting and sending back information.
Philae will analyze the structure, composition, thermal properties and outgassing of the comet. But the most interesting questions the mission explores are related to Earth.
The first is the origin of Earth’s water. One theory is that comets brought water to Earth. Analysis of the moon’s craters suggests that early in Earth’s history there was a chaotic period of frequent comet and asteroid impact. Most comets have a large amount of water, and it’s possible they supplied Earth with some or most of its water. One way for scientists to investigate this question is to measure comet water’s ratio of deuterium isotopes to common hydrogen. This ratio varies from location to location in the solar system, and will reveal whether or not the water on earth is similar to the water on comets.
Scientists also think comets and asteroids carry important chemicals for life such as nucleic and amino acids. Some scientists speculate that comets or asteroids could have seeded earth with these chemicals and contributed to the origin of life. Life on earth uses left-handed amino acid isomers, and by investigating the isomers of the comet’s amino acids we will discover whether left-handed or right-handed isomers are present on comets.
Rosetta is just one of several space missions planned for the near future. Equally exciting are the prospects of the replacement of the Hubble with the James Webb telescope, a robotic rover’s journey to the dwarf planet Ceres, and a manned expedition to Mars.
The moments of discovery when there’s a change in our perception of ourselves and our relationship to the universe are the most galvanizing aspects of science, and Rosetta is a perfect example. Rosetta hasn’t discovered anything yet and might not find anything of great significant. But it’s the intangible hope of future answers that inspires and motivates scientists to tirelessly confront the unknown. In general, this column will brood on issues in science that are more controversial, elicit greater trepidation and necessitate deeper nuance, but I wanted to start with an example of what, I think, most captivates people about science.
(09/10/14 2:10pm)
The College is a surprisingly busy place during the summer, with its hodgepodge of researchers, employees, Bread Loaf students, and language learners. This summer, 11 students attending the new Middlebury School of the Environment also joined the mix. The program ran for six weeks, from June 20 to Aug. 1.
The School of the Environment is the brainchild of its director and Professor of Environmental and Biosphere Studies Stephen Trombulak. Trombulak initially proposed the idea of a summer school in the late 1990’s. After years of planning, the Middlebury board of trustees approved the school in the spring of 2013.
Trombulak thinks the College is uniquely positioned to start a successful environmental summer school because of its long history of summer programs, large network of alumni in environmental careers and strong, pioneering environmental studies department.
“Middlebury has had an environmental studies program as part of its academic curriculum for almost 50 years,” Trombulak said. “In fact, Middlebury’s program in environmental studies was the first major anywhere in the country, founded in 1965. We have worked tirelessly over the years to build a program that highlights the best of what is needed to offer a full spectrum of exposure to the study of the environment.”
Despite being the school’s first summer, students thought it was a success.
“It was an amazing summer,” wrote Isaac Baker ’14.5 in an email. “Given that it was the first year of the program, I had my reservations, but the faculty really showed up and put in the time to make it an incredibly immersive and valuable experience.”
Students took three courses. Two courses, including Sustainability Practicum, equivalent to Middlebury’s Environmental Studies Senior Seminar, and Understanding Place, a course focusing on Lake Champlain as a case study, were mandatory. The third course was an elective. Kaitlin Fink ’16 explained they were not typical college courses.
“I came into this program thinking that I was enrolled in three environmental studies courses; what I came away with was a whole new method of approaching complex systems in general – not just the environment – and a set of skills that has given me greater confidence in my ability to hopefully affect broader change in the future,” she said.
Baker agreed that the courses were more hands-on than normal college courses.
“We had reading, and plenty of it, but most days were spent doing things like working on a project, going to a museum, taking a historically-oriented hike, interviewing folks a few years into their environmental careers, or taking core samples on the College’s research vessel [The RV Folger],” he said.
For a four-week project in their Sustainability Practicum course, students were tasked with identifying problems the College could face in the future because of climate change and formulating solutions. The School of the Environment will consider and possibly implement their ideas.
“We chose to propose the purchase of a high-voltage generator for extended power outages, the burial of all above-ground power lines on campus, and the implementation of a rainwater collection system for several of our campus buildings” Fink said. “It was amazing to get to have this sort of ‘real world’ experience. I’m hoping to continue to work on our proposals throughout the rest of my time here at Middlebury, and maybe help to push along the path toward implementation.”
On a typical day students were busy from nine until dinner with breaks in between. Fink found that the small size of the school had several benefits.
“We were all taking the same set of courses, so, unlike during the standard school year, we could draw on ideas or readings from one course in discussion with another. Our conversations in class would spill over into our meal periods, which our professors attended with us, making for an incredibly rich intellectual environment where it was entirely normal for dialogues about Marxism or animal rights to exist alongside standard lunchtime chatter.”
The school had ten visiting speakers - called “practitioners in residence” - come to talk about their experiences working for positive environmental change. The speakers included Schumann Distinguished Scholar Bill McKibben, renowned activist and founder of 350.org, Gus Speth, environmental author and former member of the President’s Task Force on Global Resources and Environment, and Alden Woodrow, business team leader for Google’s Makani airborne wind turbine project.
“What’s really unique about the school and what makes it so exciting is that we’re embedding not just information about the environment, but the skills necessary for students to become leaders in the field and to do something with the information,” Trombulak explained. “[The practitioners in residence] will not just talk about the skills in theory but how those skills have played out in their own settings and their own sectors they’ve been working in.”
Baker agreed that the visiting fellows were a highlight of the program.
“The mix of people the school brought in was what kept each long day feel manageable, while also making it exciting and meaningful,” Baker said.
The school was located in Middlebury its first summer but Trombulak thinks it will eventually move to a different location.
“There are many exciting possibilities,” Tromhulak said. “We could establish a campus in a city to explore issues associated with urban studies, or hold the school in a coastal region to explore curricula associated with marine studies.”
For Fink, her summer at the school was a motivating experience.
“The School of the Environment reignited my passion for the environmental challenges facing our world today, and I feel like I have started to develop the tools that will enable me to dive in somewhere and be able to effect positive change,” she said. “I don’t have all the answers yet – I don’t think I ever really will - but I know that I care, and now I at least know how and where to start.”
(05/07/14 3:17pm)
The physicist Richard Feynman once wrote “we are very lucky to be living in an age in which we are still making discoveries… and that day will never come again. It is very exciting, it is marvelous, but this excitement will have to go.”
Although I’m skeptical that science will come to an end in the foreseeable future or even at all, the hypothetical is still interesting to contemplate. If there are only so many questions left to investigate then we should join in on the fun of discovery before it ends.
I had this thought in mind while I watched several of this year’s science thesis presentations and I couldn’t help but feel, along with awe and admiration, a tinge of envy. These students were already participating in the honorable task of furthering human knowledge and they were clearly enjoying it.
A thesis represents around a year’s worth of independent research. To pass their theses, students are required to give presentations to a general audience as well as defend their theses in front of a committee of three professors.
A senior thesis is optional for all science majors except for math majors. But theses are required in order to earn honors for chemistry, biochemistry, MBB, and biology.
“The percentage of students completing a thesis varies a lot year by year but I would guess between a quarter and a third of out students complete a thesis," Philip B. Stewart & Sarah F. Cowles Stewart Professor of Chemistry Jeff Byers said about the thesis process. “Another third do some short term research over a J-term or semester.”
Recently fewer students have chosen to do theses. “The percentage of students completing thesis has plummeted because everyone wants to do double majors,” Byers explained. “When you do a double major you lose depth in both majors, which I consider a shame. I’m a big proponent of a major minor combination, even if the major is not in my discipline.”
Many students make the decision to do a thesis in their junior years and start work the summer before their senior year but the process is flexible.
Elaine Dellinger ’14 described how she got started on her thesis.
“I took an unusual route. I wasn’t planning on doing a thesis and I was just going to do summer research. I stayed here over the summer and worked with Molly-Costanza Robinson on her project. After the summer I thought I was done but in the fall we had some new ideas for different experiments so I decided to stay on and just do senior independent research and not a thesis. At the end of the semester I had to do a write up and I hadn’t realized how much data I had and how much I had to discuss. I ended up writing 40 pages for a short report and when I turned that in my advisor said I should just turn it into a thesis.”
Dellinger did her thesis on organically modified clays and water contaminant remediation. In her presentation she explained that organic contaminants such as BPA, steroids, pesticides, and antibiotics are prevalent in our water sources and that scientists are trying to find ways to remedy this.
“It turns out our drinking water treatment facilities are not that well suited for removing these types of organic contaminants.” Elaine explained. “An emerging method of water remediation for these types contaminants is the use of organically modified clays as absorbents to take in these contaminants from the water.”
She focused her research on one of the most promising types of clay called montmorillonite. Montmorillonite is composed of many small platelets stacked on top of each other and she looked at the interlayer space between them.
“The interlayer space is really important for the purpose of using this as a remediation technique because the interlayer space is where these contaminants would migrate into when they are absorbed from the water,” she said.
Dellinger specifically investigated how placing surfactant molecules in the interlayer space helps the clays absorb more organic contaminants. She found that when they increased the amount of surfactants in the clay the amount of inter-layer space increased but the crystallinity also increased, which would make it harder for contaminants to migrate into the clay. She proposed that to optimize absorbance they would have to create surfactant modified clay that maximized inter-layer space but minimized the crystallinity.
Brian Ayers ’14 also presented a thesis this year titled “The conjugation of anti-CD 47 antibodies to gold nanoparticles via click chemistry for cancer therapy.” In his presentation Ayers explained that anti-CD 47 antibodies were promising chemotherapy drugs because they were able to distinguish between healthy cells and cancer cells, unlike most current chemotherapy drugs, which have negative side effects.
Cancer cells normally avoid detection from the immune system because they display an extracelluar protein called CD 47.
“Researchers call this the ‘don’t eat my signal’,” Ayers said. “You can kind of think of it like a fake ID that it shows our immune system to pretend like it’s a normal cell.” The anti-CD 47 antibody blocks this ‘don’t eat me signal’ and enables the immune system to attack the cancer cells.
Ayer’s focused his research on finding a way to better deliver the anti-CD 47 antibodies to tumors. If antibodies are injected alone they don’t accumulate in tumors because have a ’leaky vasculature’ and antibodies flow right through them. But Ayers thinks that if he connects the anti-CD 47 antibodies to gold nanoparticles they will be more likely to accumulate in tumors.
“Gold nanoparticles are larger and as they travel through a tumor they will reach a pore that they can’t fit through. It’s like a roadblock. So they get stuck there and they start aggregating and that’s why they have this enhanced permeability and retention rate.”
During his year of research Ayer’s successfully connected anti-CD 47 antibodies to gold nanoparticles. In the future he plans to test them on cultures of cancer cells and on mice to see their effectiveness.
Dellinger and Ayer’s theses are just two examples of the brilliant work done by this year’s cohort of thesis students. Ultimately, a short article is unable to do justice to these students and the best thing to do is ask about their research in person. Senior theses and undergraduate research are two of the most remarkable aspects of Middlebury and are well worth the time to investigate. They’re one of Byers’ favorite things about Middlebury.
“There’s no better way to get your money’s worth out of a Middlebury education than individual mentorship of a Middlebury college professor on a research project. In my mind, the major goal of a liberal arts education is to teach students how to think on their own and become life long learners. Nothing does that like generating truly new knowledge,” he said.
(04/16/14 8:34pm)
When I tell people I go to Middlebury, the second most frequent question I’m asked, after “Where is that?” is, in its blunt variation, “Why did you chose a school in the middle of nowhere?” One of my friends from the West Coast once remarked sarcastically that he chose to come to Middlebury because it’s “centrally located”. But, besides him, most of the people I’ve talked to view Middlebury as the epitome of remote and many wonder why someone would select so rural a school.
My go-to response is to mention the ability to see the stars. Some of my favorite moments here have been star-gazing with friends or learning the names of constellations for an astronomy class. Night light is the downside of city night life and light pollution can make star-gazing in a city difficult.
Star-gazing with the unaided eye is an awe-inspiring experience in and of itself, but now all students at the College will also have the opportunity to gaze further into the depths of the cosmos with the help of the 24-inch telescope in McCardell Bicentennial Hall. The school recently announced that it will start holding open observatory nights again after a yearlong hiatus.
The recent arrival of Middlebury’s new Telescope Specialist, Jonathan Kemp, will make the public observatory nights possible. Kemp will also work closely with astronomy classes and student researchers to aid their use of the telescope.
“In the past, there have been a combination of faculty members who have put effort into the observatory” Kemp explained, “but now the idea is that I’ll be dedicated to the observatory and we’ll be able to better integrate the observatory with both curricular needs and student research. We’ll also be able to revive the public observing nights, make them more frequent, and extend our public outreach programs to school visits or local groups. There’s a lot of possibility and it’s all pretty exciting.”
The first observing night will be during preview days. Kemp plans on holding more during the summer and next fall. During open observatory nights, he will operate the large telescope and set up four smaller telescopes on the roof of the buiding.
When asked about some of the astronomical objects that he will be showing, he said that “there are a lot of possibilities. The moon, though sometimes offensive because of the light pollution that it causes, is a great target. People who have never seen the moon through a telescope before find its surface and craters fantastic. Looking at Jupiter and Saturn and Mars is quite interesting. You can see the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter. Those are all good. And there’s a set of deeper sky objects like globular clusters, nebula and galaxies that we’ll also look at.
The College’s telescope is the latest in a long list of telescopes that Kemp has worked with. When he attended Columbia University, he used telescopes situated around the world.
“At Middlebury we can do small telescope research but really not such much at Columbia because of light pollution,” he said. “So when I was at Columbia, while we could do some public outreach with the telescope, almost all the research was done elsewhere. So I travelled to Arizona, Chile and to South Africa to use their professional telescopes.”
In 2000, Kemp moved to Hawaii to work with the James Clerk Maxwell telescope, the largest telescope that investigates radiation in the infrared and microwave regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.
“I did a variety of things to help operate the telescope. I observed with the telescope, wrote programs and software, and did computing support and graphic design. There was always a lot to do which is something that I like.”
I was curious to know the place and purpose of Middlebury’s telescope in the context of the astronomical world. A lot of attention is focused on larger telescopes such as the Hubble telescope or its future successor the John Web telescope but research is done on telescopes of all sizes. I asked Kemp where Middlebury’s telescope fits in.
“A lot of people say bigger is better in respect to telescope and mirror size, and with some science that is true.” Kemp said. “There are faint objects in the sky such as stars, galaxies, quasars, etc that you can’t see with this telescope. But you can still do science, and in the move to larger telescopes and complexity a lot of people who study astronomy don’t get the opportunity to operate a telescope and when you have a small telescope you have an intimate hands on experience of learning how to operate the telescope. When you combine that with a spirit of scientific inquiring of asking questions and getting data a lot can still be accomplished.”
An additional upside to the observation nights is that the roof of BiHall will be open for naked eye star-gazing. As the highest point on campus, the top of BiHall provides a spectacular night-sky panorama that is unrivaled on campus.
“There are a lot of things you can appreciate with our 24 inch telescope and the smaller telescopes,” Kemp said, “but its also great to have that visceral and connected experience of just standing out in a rural area at night with the Milky Way above and identifying the constellations.”
Kemp will be launching a new observatory website and posting a schedule of events in the coming months. Come to one of the events to experience one of the perks of living in the middle of nowhere
(03/05/14 10:14pm)
Cameron Visiting Artist Jake Winiski gave a lecture titled “How an Artist Becomes A Biologist” last Tuesday, Feb, 25. In his talk Winiski detailed an unordinary life spent in pursuit of the fantastic in both his capacity as an artist and a scientist.
Winiski is a research biologist for the company Ecovative and he presented their efforts to build biodegradable materials from fungi and their vision of a world rid of Styrofoam and other environmentally disastrous industrial materials. He also exhibited his strange yet wonderful art that revolves around a self-constructed miniature world.
Winiski began the lecture showcasing and explaining his work as an artist. All his work is based off a miniature world he first created in 2009, when he “started building this room-size model with junk: cardboard, paint, tape, etc.”
The image he showed us of his entire world looked chaotic and colorful, a jumble of oddball materials seemingly randomly placed. The model he has now contains the same materials he first put into it in 2009.
“It has gone through constant breaking down and reconstruction,” Winiski said. “I’ll rip it apart and rebuild it. In the end it needs to be a stand-alone world that is governed by similar rules than this world. So when materials go into this world, they don’t come out.”
Winiski takes up-close photos of different areas of his models and later paints them. His images are a 50:50 hybrid of photography and painting. Often he paints in faces to create what he calls the hopeful monster.
“Over the years, as I’ve taken on a more biological perspective from my second life, I’ve become really fascinated by the idea of the hopeful monster,” he said. “Evolution is not always a slow gradual process but sometimes manifests itself as a dramatic mutation. And that gives a portion of the population this mutation, and it’s essentially a monster. That mutation either gives a benefit to the organism, which allows it to out-compete the rest of the population, and it essentially becomes normal, or it fails and it’s bred out of the larger population. What I’m trying to do with these images is create an entire world full of hopeful monsters. “
The idea for the model was catalyzed by his interest in crypozoological photography, or photos of supposed mythical creatures such as big foot and the lochness monster.
“Cryptozoological photography is a beautiful indication of how the human myth-building impulse has been transferred to the modern age and our current technology,” Winiski said. “The simplicity of interjecting into a photograph, circling a blurry image, and proposing the possibility of some amazing humanoid creature was fascinating. But instead of going out into the world to find sasquatches I started building my own worlds, and I would look for Sasquatches inside it.”
The second part of Winiski’s lecture described his work for the company Ecovative. Ecovative is a recent material science start-up that seeks to build biodegradable materials from agricultural waste to replace the energy intensive and non-degradable materials often used in packaging such as Styrofoam blocks.
To build materials they use the properties of fungus and specifically their hyphae, or their root-like structures that bury underground. They take agricultural waste, such as corns husks or oat hulls, and place them into a template that shapes them into the desired material like a packaging brick around a television. They add fungus and their hyphae spread around the material and hold it together like glue. The hyphae then digest and convert the feed-stock into a stronger material called chitinous polymer. They heat and dry the material to inactivate the fungus. At the end of the process they have a strong material of chitin and dead hyphae that can be used as packaging material.
Winiski hopes that this material will start to be used in place of synthetic industrial materials such as Styrofoam.
“When you get a TV or most any other product by mail it comes with Styrofoam corner blocks and you immediately chuck them out. But one cubic foot of this material takes the amount of energy given off by burning a liter and a half of petrol,” he said. “Furthermore, that Styrofoam is going to sit around in a landfill for tens of thousands of years. Styrofoam accounts for more than a third of the mass of landfills, and most of that is coming from products that are ephemeral, that were packaged in a TV, shipped and was only used for two weeks. We’re trying to build materials that reduce the amount of input energy by half and can be used for their three or four week cycle and then can be tossed out in the garden because they’re gonna decompose.”
Winiski only recently started working for Ecovative. He had worked a variety of jobs to support his artistic endeavors, and stumbled into his job as a research biologist.
“Over the last few years, mostly by accident, but with a little bit of luck, I backed my way into working as a research biologist,” he said. “My only formal training is in the arts. I think I took one biology class as an undergrad. I essentially knew nothing before coming. I learned on my feet through observation.”
Winiski works in product design. He explained how each species has their own unique properties and uses, and he explores how new species can be incorporated into the production process.
“What I do is essentially just play, something that many biologists understand,” Winiski said. “I try new materials, observe how they work, how it feels, how it resists being cut and what it does when it’s growing.”
Winiski ended by challenging the distinction between artist and scientist. He posited that they both require a similar way of thinking, and said skills crossed over between his two professions.
“I leveraged non-linear explorative, creative experiences and applied that to research and developed of biomaterials for Ecovative,” he said.
(02/26/14 4:37pm)
I had noticed a couple of times a locked door in Bihall with pictures of octopuses and a sign “octopi wallstreet”, so when my friend Jacob Dixon ’16.5 mentioned he was going to feed the baby octopuses my curiosity was naturally raised and I offered to tag along. When I stepped inside the cephalapod room with its loudly humming pumps and filters and its strong stench of marine biology, I felt removed from Middlebury. Packed inside the room, originally a small janitor’s supply closet, were two 300-galllon tanks containing the octopuses (octopodes is also an acceptable plural, but not octopi). In the first tank one of the three adult California two-spot octopuses floated in sight. Its tentacles stretched nearly a foot and a half, and on its side was its characteristic bright blue dot, one of the two false eyes that give the octopuses their name. Jacob went about feeding small shrimp to the 48 thumb-nail sized babies floating in Tupperware containers on the top of the two tanks.
The College has intermittently kept octopuses for neurological and psychological research since 2008, when two students along with Biology Professor Tom Root opened the lab to study invertebrate intelligence. Researchers have found that octopuses have remarkably complex minds and have evolved emotions, individual personalities and intelligence. Students at the College have sought to build off these discoveries and delve into the workings of the octopus brain and the nature of the mind. In past experiments, students have tested the memories of octopuses by placing them in mazes. Jamie Hillas ’15 will begin a project this spring also investigating the learning capabilities of octopuses. But before Hillas is able to do research, the octopus babies will have to survive and mature.
Alexandra Spencer-Wong ’16 and Amity Calvin ’16 head a crew of volunteers including Jacob Dixon ’16.5, Lisa Wooldridge ’16, Michelle Irei ’15, Tiff Ting ’14, Max Anderson ’14, and Alix Bickson ’14 in charge of the daunting task of looking after and feeding the baby octopuses. Last year another team of caretakers ran into unfortunate problems while taking care of a different group of baby octopuses.
“They had them during the spring and they survived for 6 weeks,” Calvin said, “but they went off on a break and when they came back they found out there was a high spike in nitrate levels, and they all died.”
Dixon, a published aquarium enthusiast, also explained how maintaining good water quality and monitoring the levels of dangerous chemical byproducts is the most essential part of keeping an aquarium.
“Octopuses and invertebrates in general are very sensitive to nitrate,” he said, “and I think that was the reason for their deaths. For example in my aquarium at home I tried to keep the nitrate levels between zero and five parts per million (ppm). In here they spiked about forty.”
He described a number of ways he kept nitrate levels in check in his previous aquariums and how they are currently trying to do so with the octopus tanks.
“You can introduce live rock with resident nitrifying bacteria that convert nitrate into a more disposable form, or you can introduce macroalgae and they consume nitrates as they grow,” Dixon said. “One of the best ways is to cycle clean pure water through and remove the water with nitrates.”
The octopus eggs were laid in December, and they hatched during February break. Spencer-Wong recalled the excitement of that day.
“We were about to leave — it was just a routine feeding,” he said, “then I looked down and I said ‘Amity, what’s that there’. All of a sudden there were babies everywhere. They would hatch in waves of 15. We had literally made the Tupperware container the day before. I put up this really desperate Facebook status calling anyone on campus to come to the room and help, thankfully a couple of friends showed up. There was a frenzy to try and catch them and put them in the right place and make sure they didn’t slip through the cracks of the aquarium. That was a challenge.”
Since then they have been busy feeding and looking after the octopuses.
“We’ve been feeding them twice a day and we do one head count a day,” Calvin said. “It’s been difficult finding out how much we need to feed them to keep them from eating each other.”
Another difficulty is keeping them from escaping.
“They are the greatest escape artists that you have ever seen,” Wooldridge said. “I’ve opened the tank to catch one and I’ve seen one trying to climb out of the tank and I have to push them back down.” Reportedly 6-foot long octopuses can squeeze through a hole the size of an orange.
“We didn’t anticipate this continuing in the spring,” Spencer-Wong said. “We thought we would come by and maybe feed them once a week. But now we’re pretty much in charge of feeding the babies which is intense but it’s been a fun experience and we’ve learned a lot.”
After watching the creatures for a few minutes jet around and wrap their snarling tentacles around prey I could easily see how spending time with them was enticing.
“One of the best things about working with them is that you can see a personality,” Spencer-Wong said. “You can see for instance ‘oh, Reggies is grumpy today’ or when I wear a very intensely patterned sweater the octopus would put up these angry horns and run away so I stopped wearing that sweater around them.”
“Their color changing capabilities are just incredible,” Calvin added. “They can blend in so perfectly, and they change color a lot of the time. When you feed them, sometimes their blue spots will pulse very quickly. When they are relaxed they turn this calm, pale, white shade. “
The group hopes that at least 10 of the baby octopuses will survive into the spring. Currently they have 7 student volunteers.
“You can never have too many volunteers,” Calvin said. “If you know anyone whose interested send them over. We’re gonna work with the octopuses until there are no more left.”