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(02/12/14 9:43pm)
The Olympic conversation at lunch the other day turned to genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Someone mentioned that Russia is attempting to ban GMOs outright (check out the Feb. 3 article on the Russian news site RT under the headline “Total ban on GMO food production mulled in Russia”). There was much head shaking around the table over the fact that, in the United States, the government is struggling to even get GMOs labeled. Someone commented that it seemed wrong to be messing with the plants and animals that make our food in the laboratory, conjuring images of pipettes and test tubes and 75 percent ethanol.
It is interesting to note the strong emotional response many seem to have to GMOs. I routinely get emails from Food Democracy Now! Similar to this Jan. 24 plea:
“Dear Will, If you haven’t heard, apples are the single most popular fruit served in school lunchrooms across the U.S. and a fruit so iconic it was the fruit that inspired Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity and the heartbeat of the phrase, ‘as American as apple pie!’
“Tragically, a Canadian firm has created a new GMO apple, using a new “gene silencing” technique that could interfere with the expression of genes in humans, even silencing vital human genes, potentially causing serious health problems.”
Of course, my immediate emotional response is: how could anyone possibly let a company sell such an apple? But then, the Molecular Biology and Biochemistry major in me pauses; what is this new “’gene silencing’ technique”? And how does it work? And what vital human genes does it silence? And where is all of the research that proves these claims? Where is the data?
Some quick Google work reveals that the company in question is Okanagan Specialty Fruits, which strives “to develop new commercial tree fruit varieties that offer exciting benefits to the entire supply chain, from growers to consumers,” according to their website.
The genetically modified apple in question is a strain that the company has created called Artic® apples. The company claims that the apples do not brown from “bruising, cutting, or biting.”
Apparently, scientists at Okanagan Specialty Fruits stopped the browning process by suppressing production of the enzyme polyphenol oxidase (PPO). The technique was developed by Australian researchers in potatoes. The technique used to silence the production of PPO is called RNA interference. I won’t go into details here, but it’s a fascinating technique.
Where is the research demonstrating that the act of eating a fruit expressing PPO suppression RNA can have dangerous effects on human health? Entire books have been written on the subject. It is vast, complex and intricate, and there is no easy answer to the question of the safety of GMOs.
So, what’s my point? I find the strong emotional response to GMOs expressed by individuals, non-profits groups like Food Democracy Now! and governments intriguing and disturbing. Though, for the record, I find the actions of biotechnology companies like Monsanto equally disturbing.
When an email about GMOs starts with a fact about school lunchrooms, I see an emotional and populist appeal that demonstrates a complete lack of willingness to dig deeply into the issue of GMOs and critically examine its many facets. In twenty minutes with a computer and Internet access – hardly deep digging – I found an entire semester-worth of work. Anyone receiving Food Democracy Now! presumably has both a computer and Internet, and could come to the same conclusion.
To my lunchmates the other day and to the campus at large, hear my plea: There is lots of work to be done around the issue of genetically modified organisms and their place in society. Please don’t jump to emotional conclusions. Start reading, thinking and questioning. It’s the only way we’ll ever arrive at a rational, reasonable solution.
(01/19/14 11:50pm)
When I told a friend that I would be taking Studio Art over J-term at dinner in November, she laughed and warned me that the final projects would be a challenge. I snorted with derision. Studio Art wasn’t a science class; so how difficult could it be, really?
Pride comes before the fall. I just got out of my second Monday class, and I’m not laughing; I’m getting steamrolled. “Disaster” would be a generous description of Thursday’s perspective exercise. I’ve realized I can’t draw a straight line to save my life. My handwriting and my thoughtlessness when it comes to the relationship between an object and its labeling text were both pronounced “sloppy”. My professor eyed my incomplete still life drawing assigned over the weekend with a mixture of disappointment and disdain and made a passing comment about incomplete drawings demonstrating a lack of commitment to both the art and the class. Thinking art effortless, I hadn’t given myself enough time to complete the assignment.
Studio Art delivered swift retribution for my arrogance; I’ve been humbled, shamed, deflated. My pride has been exposed as a crutch.
How was it a crutch? I wanted to believe that the lens through which I choose to view the world – as a molecular biologist (an oversimplification, but necessary for the sake of brevity) - as superior because those lenses brings structure and meaning to my existence. Why did I pine for superiority? It probably had something to do with a sense of insecurity about my conception of self that results in a breed of hyper-competitiveness. I was deluded into thinking that if my worldview were superior, I would somehow win the game of life.
My need to structure my experience into a meaningful pattern is neither an anomaly nor a negative need. I’ve created a self, labeled part of it “molecular biologist,” and as the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi notes in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, “Every piece of information [I] process gets evaluated for its bearing on [that] self. Does it threaten [my] goals, does it support them, or is it neutral?” My self-conception is a yardstick I use to measure and judge incoming information. It is a useful scheme insofar as it helps me understand day-to-day experience.
But that yardstick becomes problematic when used competitively, to judge another conception of the world as better or worse. I think that in my arrogance, I had relegated art to a position of inferiority in my mind to validate my own worldview, in which art did not yet have a place.
Reality proves again and again to be infinitely more complicated than any conception of it that a human or society can dream up. This complexity can either be a negative force of entropy or a positive source of richness and enrichment depending on an individual’s mindset. When the self is used as a tool of self-validation to ward off complexity out of fear of entropy, it becomes problematic, a cage in which we lock our minds.
My self was locked in this cage when I shrugged off Studio Art I. I wanted it to be “easy” because I was afraid to conceive of it as anything but; to do so meant acknowledging that the world worked in ways beyond what I conceived of as possible as a molecular biologist.
I’m glad I enrolled in the class, and I’m glad it’s kicking my ass. I think I’ve managed to liberate my self, even if only briefly. Today, for the first time in my life, I walked around campus looking at the buildings and landscape with the eye of an artist; I found vanishing points and horizon lines, and have a whole new appreciation for the aesthetics of the steel I-beams of the Proctor ceiling.
(12/05/13 3:18am)
“Human beings in a mob / What’s a mob to a king? / What’s a king to a god? / What’s a god to a non-believer who don’t believe in anything?”
The haunting Frank Ocean hook in “No Church in the Wild” from Watch the Throne played through my head as I read Jennifer Couzin-Frankel’s article, “When Mice Mislead” in the Nov. 22 News Focus section of the Science magazine website.
Couzin-Frankel writes about recent waves made in the animal research community by those questioning current drug-trial models in animals. One of those wave-makers is Ulrich Dirnagl, a German researcher who is calling attention to the negative aspects of the practice of cutting animals out of a results set without justification.
Couzin-Frankel writes, “Dropping animals from a research study for any number of reasons…is an entrenched, accepted part of the culture [in animal research]. ‘You look at your data, there are no rules. … People exclude animals at their whim, they just do it and they don’t report it,’ [said Dirnagl]. That bad habit, he believes, is one of several that plague animal studies.”
Animal studies have been used to explore potential drug therapies for decades. And during all those years, “researchers, pharmaceutical companies, drug regulators, and even the general public have lamented how rarely therapies that cure animals do much of anything for humans.”
Why is that the case? Is human biology so dramatically different from animal biology as to make animal models irrelevant? Many have asked that question, and “much attention has focused on whether mice with different diseases accurately reflect what happens in sick people. But Dirnagl and some others suggest there’s another equally acute problem,” according to Couzin-Frankel, and one that has less to do with different biology and more to do with how the studies are conducted.
Malcolm Macleod from the University of Edinburgh analyzed variations in experimental technique in animal drug trials and found a general lack of randomization and blinding, both of which increase experimental objectivity, that has resulted in skewed data.
In the studies analyzed, “many of these authors likely didn’t recognize what Macleod perceived as lack of rigor in their studies because their mentors, and their mentors’ mentors, had not [conducted randomized, blinded trials],” he writes.
There’s a sort of institutional inertia in the animal research community – passed down from mentor to mentee – that has resulted in a pervasive lack of built-in checks to ensure objectivity.
How did the scientific community allow such a lapse in objectivity to occur?
I would like to propose an answer, for what it’s worth. Reading Couzin-Frankel’s accounts of mice dropped out of data sets at greatest convenience, it struck me that the real issue at play is a lack of curiosity.
The scientists leaving data out of studies have lost sight of the purpose of scientific investigation: to gain some knowledge and insight into the workings of the world. Instead of investigating why the data – the whole data set, not just a piece – appears the way it did, these scientists are choosing to shape the results to match their bias, a bias influenced by ego, funding sources, institutional inertia – a whole host of factors.
Bias is a problem in the scientific endeavor because it is the first step toward doctrine. Biased reporting of results contradicts the fundamental tenet of science: that any and all theories are open to be modified or turned on their head if enough significant evidence presents itself.
Science is not a biased doctrine. It is a mindset, a humble attempt to understand the unknown, the other, the wildness of this world in which we live. The scientist must be a “non-believer, who [doesn’t] believe in anything,” Couzin-Frankel said, in order to construct her understanding of the world from objective observation and from her understanding, construct a meaningful narrative.
(11/14/13 1:22am)
This summer I had the opportunity to be part of an interdisciplinary research team trying to build an automated biosensor to detect aromatic hydrocarbons in the water supply. As a rising sophomore, I had never done research before, and had only just declared myself a molecular biology and biochemistry (MBBC) major. I wasn’t at a large research institution or in some industrial laboratory. I spent my summer at Middlebury College, in McCardell Bicentennial Hall, working on the project full time with seven other students. We were a group of MBBC and Physics majors, rising sophomores to recent graduates, and we worked on the conception and design of our automated biosensor from the end of January through the middle of August.
The program I participated in is very much in its infancy; to my knowledge, it is the first time anything of the sort has ever been tried at Middlebury. We had no catchy name; we were called the “STEM Pilot Project,” or the “STEM Innovation Project 2013” or often just “the STEM Team.” To clarify, STEM is the acronym used to refer to all science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines.
The program emerged from a generous gift from Margaret and William D. Hearst, who have long supported STEM-related projects and ideas. The goal? To attempt to solve some STEM-related problem through an interdisciplinary approach.
Last year’s STEM team applied in mid-October to be part of the program by submitting an idea, a solution to some problem. Three faculty mentors, Associate Professor of Physics Noah Graham, Professor of Mathematics Frank Swenton, and the Albert D. Mead Professor of Biology Jeremy Ward selected the applicants based on the quality of our proposed idea.
Those ideas were then used during a J-term course as “seed ideas.” The group spent most of J-term brainstorming, developing and defending ideas for potential projects over the summer, and by the end of J-term, we had decided on a single idea. We wanted to genetically engineer bacteria to fluoresce in the presence of aromatic hydrocarbons (byproducts of petroleum production and consumption) and then build a device that could be used to monitor fluorescence levels in the bacteria in real time. We envisioned the device being used by homeowners concerned about water contamination from hydraulic fracturing or in water-quality monitoring projects.
Through the spring semester, we continued to develop our project and conduct background research, meeting twice a month to update each other on progress. In mid-June, we arrived back on campus for eight weeks of intense work on the project.
Did we succeed in creating a final product? No. Did we have something to show for our work? Yes. By the end of the summer, we had developed a bacterial line that we believe is close to being able to fluoresce in the presence of aromatic hydrocarbons, and we had built a prototype device that was capable of detecting fluorescence in bacterial cultures. But we did not publish a paper, nor did we contribute to faculty research, nor did we develop a marketable product.
What then was the purpose of the STEM Program? How is it relevant? How does it fit into the picture of a Middlebury liberal arts education?
For the record, the goal of the program was never to get published or develop a marketable product. The goal was far broader than that. Graham elucidated the goal of the STEM Program in a recent email. The goal, he wrote, is “to complement the traditional curriculum, by both giving an opportunity for students to apply the in-depth knowledge they’ve gained through their majors in an interdisciplinary way.”
Ward was keen to highlight that the STEM program is not a replacement by any means of the traditional classroom learning that goes on at the College.
“Lecture has a lot of rote learning, but that’s not a bad thing,” he wrote in an email. “You need to build rote recall of topics … [to] synthesize them into higher order concepts.”
Though we live in the Information Age, where all knowledge is never further than a wireless connection and a few finger-taps away, Ward noted that, “if you have to go to Wikipedia to look up how [DNA] replication works every time you need to know, you will never be able to innovate using a PCR [protocol].”
“All of the information and conceptual understanding gained in courses serve as intellectual ‘raw material’,” Swenton added in an email, “ready to be put into action. Learning with breadth as well as depth is what helps one to see as many angles as possible when confronted with a specific problem to solve. I see a project like [the STEM Program] as serving as a catalyst – but a catalyst needs raw materials to help the reaction happen, and that’s what one’s coursework provides.”
But what is STEM a catalyst for? According to Graham, the STEM experience should give students a new perspective on their education, and “[they should] be able to return to courses in (and outside of) their majors with a stronger sense of how what they are learning can be applied to solve technological problems.”
On Wednesday, Oct. 30, Dean of Faculty and Philip Battell/Sarah Stewart Professor of Biology Andrea Lloyd discussed the relevance of a Middlebury education in her lecture “The Evolution of the Liberal Arts at Middlebury College.” (the full lecture can be found online through MiddMedia). She defined a relevant education as one that, among other things, equips students to “solve the complex, multi-dimensional problems confronting the world.”
I want to re-examine my earlier questions through the lens of educational relevance. In many ways, the STEM program epitomizes Lloyd’s definition of relevance. It is an opportunity for students to try their hand at solving the “complex, multi-dimensional problems confronting the world,” and then return to the classroom with a greater understanding of how their coursework contributes to their ability to solve real-world problems.
The STEM program should act, in the words of Frank Swenton, as a catalyst. It feeds the fire of passion, stimulates a hunger for broader and deeper understanding.
Did it achieve this end? Spencer Egan ’15.5, a Physics major on the project, wrote in an email, “it is rare to have an assignment with as little structure from professors as the STEM project. The program required problem solving on a wide rage of scales … and demanded a high level of … critical thinking every day. While frustrating at times, working as independently as we did was the most rewarding part of the job.”
Will it continue to achieve this end? The next generation of STEMites was selected last week; only time will tell.
(10/30/13 10:20pm)
How scientifically literate are you?
That could depend on your politics, according to a recent analysis conducted by the Yale Law School and Psychology Professor Dan M. Kahan ’86.
John Bohannon published an article in Science Insider last Wednesday, Oct. 23 about a controversy ignited by a recent blog post Kahan wrote for the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School. According to Bohannan, Kahan conducted “an informal analysis of survey data that compares people’s comprehension of scientific concepts and their political outlook,” and found that “those who identified themselves as ‘liberal’ tended to have greater scientific comprehension than those who self-identified as ‘conservative’,” but “the effect was small — a correlation coefficient of r = 0.05 — and only weakly significant, with a probability of p = 0.03.”
However, Bohannan noted that, “many studies of people’s ideological leanings and ability to parse scientific information have found similar correlations … [leading] to the widespread perception that politically conservative beliefs go hand in hand with poor scientific understanding.”
Kahan was more reserved in his blog post entitled “Some data on education, religiosity, ideology, and science comprehension,” and less eager to draw conclusions from his analysis. He mused, “there is a small correlation (r = -0.05, p = 0.03) between the science comprehension measure and a left-right political outlook measure … which aggregates liberal-conservative ideology and party self-identification. The sign of the correlation indicates that science comprehension decreases as political outlooks move in the rightward direction — i.e., the more “liberal” and “Democrat,” the more science comprehending.”
However, he notes that in another analysis, he found that there was a positive correlation between scientific comprehension and Tea Party members.
It’s not surprising that Kahan’s findings sparked a firestorm in the blogosphere in which his words were twisted and misinterpreted. Liberals and Tea Partiers alike crowed over their superior scientific understanding (Glen Beck’s website was part of the ensuing “dialogue”), while Kahan sat back and shook his head in disbelief.
Eventually, he felt obliged to respond to the fervent commentary his initial post had inspired in a blog post entitled “Congratulations, tea party members: You are just as vulnerable to politically biased misinterpretation of science as everyone else! Is fixing this threat to our Republic part of your program?”
He noted that it is ironic and depressing that both liberals and Tea Partiers would triumphantly claim superior scientific comprehension based on the results of his analyses, which indicate such weak correlations as to be practically un-noteworthy in the scientific community.
“This association was far too trivial to be afforded any practical significance whatsoever … ” he wrote, “Anyone who might be tempted to beat his or her chest in a triumphal tribal howl over the practically meaningless correlation between right-left political outlooks & science comprehension could thus expect to find him- or herself fatally impaled the very next instant on the sharp spear tip of simple, unassailable logic.”
The controversy highlights an unfortunate truth: in the United States (though really, the world round) the public neither thinks nor functions in a manner befitting a scientifically literate society. Shocking, given the information and technological revolutions of the past century.
But why does it matter that we strive for this scientific literacy? Kahan eloquently outlined the answer.
“The best available evidence doesn’t tell anyone what policy is best.,” said Kahan. “That depends on judgments of value, which will vary — inevitably and approximately — among free and reasoning people … We will [still] have plenty to disagree about in the democratic process even when we agree about the facts. But without a reliable apprehension of the best available evidence, neither I nor they nor anyone else will be able to confidently identify which policies can be expected to advance our respective values.”
In other words, scientific literacy is fundamental in the pursuit of a stronger, healthier democracy because political dialogue based on a strong understanding of the scientific facts will result in more enlightened governance by our democratic governing body.
The question we should all ask ourselves then, as young and empowered citizens, is: how do we cultivate scientific literacy? And better yet, how can we take advantage of our time at Middlebury to aid us in this cultivation?
(10/09/13 9:14pm)
“Are Our Political Beliefs Encoded in Our DNA?”
Surrounded by news of the government shutdown, Iranian negotiations and Obamacare, this was the headline that caught my eye as I scanned the New York Times headlines. I think it was the jarring association of the two phrases, “political beliefs” and “DNA” – which I typically think of as unassociated, at least in the mainstream media — that grabbed my attention.
Written by Thomas B. Edsall, the article documents developments in a new methodology in political science called genopolitical analysis which examines correlations between genetics, physiology and political belief – and critiques of the new analytical method.
Political scientists are researching the extent to which genetics determines an individual’s political beliefs. An abstract from a Science paper from September 2008 entitled “Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits” explains that, “although political views have been thought to arise largely from individuals’ experiences, recent research suggests that they may have a biological basis.”
That biological basis to which the paper refers is a battery of physiological traits that are associated with certain political leanings. The authors found that “the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.”
However, critics argue that no such correlation exists, or that if it does, it is embedded in such a complex web of factors that extracting any meaningful connections is nigh impossible.
But another paper from the American Political Science Association (APSA), defends the budding field of genopolitical analysis by arguing that, “it is not biological determinism to posit the existence of complex collections of genes that increase the probability that certain people will display heightened or deadened response patterns to given environmental cues. And it is not antibehavioralism to suggest that true explanations of the source of political attitudes and behaviors will be found when we combine our currently detailed understanding of environmental forces with a recognition that genetic variables subtly but importantly condition human responses to environmental stimuli.”
I’m inclined to agree with Alford et al., the authors of the APSA paper. Organs and tissues make up the human body (brain included), and all our interaction with the outside world – experience – is mediated through the physical body by the five senses. New research has found that physiology is tied to political ideology. Intuitively, it seems highly unlikely that a connection between genetic composition and political beliefs does not exist. But if a connection exists, and if current research is elucidating those connections, another issue arises. What do we do with that knowledge?
Edsall suggests using the knowledge to solve the political challenges of the day. He argues that “with so much riding on political outcomes — from default on the national debt to an attack on Syria to attitudes toward climate change — understanding key factors contributing to the thinking of elected officials and voters becomes crucial. Every avenue for understanding human behavior should be on the table.”
Delving into the genetic basis of political ideologies is a bit like cracking the lid of Pandora’s box. Using knowledge of genetic influences on behavior to educate citizens within a democracy about how and why they make choices would certainly be a good use of the information. But it’s not a far stretch to imagine an Orwellian society where that that knowledge is used as a tool to engineer repression and control.
Though I agree with Edsall that the knowledge can be used to elucidate our current political problems, I do not think any one person or group should try and use that knowledge to manipulate political outcomes. I think it’s a fine line that must be walked. The exploration of the human animal and all that it does will continue. Should continue. But as new knowledge is gained, we must, as a society, ask the question: How should this knowledge be applied?
(09/26/13 3:07am)
On Sept. 7, Joe Kloc wrote on The Daily Dot about the New York Times’ coverage of recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) access to online banking records.
“If in fact the agency did crack the encryption schemes used for bank transactions (the Times is somewhat unclear on that point), then in doing so it may have solved a math problem that has long puzzled cryptographers and number theorists alike,” wrote Kloc.
Revelations about the NSA’s interest our bank accounts and transaction records aside, I was initially concerned most about the NSA’s potential mathematical breakthrough and its reluctance to come forth with the discovery. I guess on the surface level, I’d consider myself to be numbered among the opensource, collaborative school. I’m of the mind that scientific knowledge represents a body of infinitely valuable, collective objective knowledge, to which anyone in quest of the truth should have access. The realist in me argues otherwise. He argues that some research needs to remain confidential for security reasons. The sad fact of the world is that not everyone pursues certain knowledge solely for the sake of truth.
Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to a fundamental dilemma all research scientists face with regards to their work: basic or applied research?
Basic research is more intellectually appealing; it represents the scientific method at its best. A question is posed, tested, and when the results don’t hold up with the hypothesis, the scientist is often pointed in an entirely new direction. The intellectual path is not straight; it meanders across the discipline, perhaps even transcending disciplines. Basic science research is, in its purest form, an intellectual adventure.
Applied research is a different beast. It is more constricted, focused, and goal-driven and as a result, better funded. Funders want to see money well spent, and they want results they can see. But it’s this results-oriented thinking that can become dangerous at times. On April 28 of this year, Jeffrey Mervis of Science Insider, a branch of Science, wrote in an article entitled “ U.S. Lawmaker Proposes New Criteria for Choosing NSF Grants” that “the new chair of the House of Representatives science committee has drafted a bill that, in effect, would replace peer review at the National Science Foundation (NSF) with a set of funding criteria chosen by Congress.”
The article continues on to discuss reactions in the scientific and political community to this bold and misguided move. Many of the criticisms revolved around the problems that arise when the scientific review process currently in place at the NSF are replaced by criteria chosen by Congress (which would undoubtedly be politically motivated).
And now I want to bring this full circle back to the NSA and my discomfort with its purported mathematical breakthroughs. Their existence is irrelevant to me; the thought of the public reaction to the New York Times reporting makes me shudder. If the public sees the results of mathematical and scientific research being used as a tool for repression, there will be a negative knee-jerk response to the thought of publicly funded research.
According to several professors and researchers I’ve talked with, public funding is far easier to come by for applied science research; funding for basic science research trickles down as a byproduct or an afterthought. But what happens when the public perception of applied science research becomes negative? The public funding will thin out and dry up, especially if Congress dictates the funding criteria. And when funding for applied science research goes, so does any and all funding for basic science research. Looking at a short list of benefits basic science research has brought us (modern genetics, the theory of evolution, general relativity, and it goes on), I’d say that losing basic science research funding is bad news for the scientific endeavor, and I think, for the human endeavor.
But Middlebury and institutions like it can act as buffers against public opinion and funding shortages. When all other funding dries up, Middlebury can use its considerable resources to continue to continue to fund the scientific research that goes on within the walls of McCardell Bicentennial Hall. It must, for the sake of science and for the sake of humanity.
[audio mp3="http://middleburycampus.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Henriques-Column-Recording.mp3"][/audio]
Listen to WILL HENRIQUES read his column.
(09/18/13 11:20pm)
With school back in session, the student tides across campus have returned. The hushed conversations and echoing footsteps in the Tormondsen Great Hall of McCardell Bicentennial Hall rapidly build into a crescendo of babbling voices as students flood out of classrooms between class periods. Just as quickly, the quiet returns as the students flow out the door or down the hall to their next class.
This ebb and flow brings a certain sense of regularity and rhythm to the days. Its consistency is comforting.
But these tides are not quite the same from year to year. Expand the lens and it quickly becomes apparent that the tides of students that frequent Bicentennial Hall are rising. According to data provided in the annual Fact Books released to the public by the Office of Planning and Assessment, the number of science majors on campus rose 6.9 percent between the fall of 2001 and the fall of 2012. That statistic represents a 114 person increase in the number of declared natural science majors (including environmental studies-conservation biology, environmental studies-chemistry, and neuroscience).
To put that increase in perspective, during that same 12-year period the total number of declared majors (including joint and double majors) increased by twenty students.
Enrollment increased by 73 students between the fall of 2003 and the fall of 2012. Looking at the numbers, it is as though every single additional student the college admitted declared a major in the natural sciences, and then forty one students who formerly would have declared in another category changed their minds and declared natural science majors.
So, what is driving that increase?
Dean of Curriculum and Director of the Sciences Bob Cluss attributes the rise in part to an increased awareness of the College’s strength in the sciences within the applicant pool. His sense is that more students are applying to Middlebury and arriving on campus with the sciences in mind.
“I think that there are more students that are entering the top of the funnel,” Cluss said. “And there are certainly more students coming out the bottom of the funnel and winding up here in our classes, and faculty in the sciences are excited about this.”
Biochemistry, molecular biology and biochemistry (MBBC), neuroscience and mathematics have seen the largest jump in the number of declared majors. In the fall of 2001, there were 19 neuroscience majors and now, according to Professor of Biology and Director of the Neuroscience Program Tom Root, there are already over 100 declared neuroscience majors in total this fall. Other departments have seen more moderate increases in the last twelve years, but increases nonetheless.
Departments that appear to be flagging in the number of declared majors are computer science and biology, but those numbers are deceptive. When the number of environmental studies-conservation biology students is taken into account, the number of declared majors in the biology department increases by 17 percent compared to 12 years ago. The computer science department is so overwhelmed with interest in introductory-level classes they have hired additional faculty.
The rise in the number of declared natural science majors parallels an increase in the number of students enrolled in natural science classes. According to data provided by Associate Professor of Physics and Chair of the Physics Department Noah Graham, the number of students enrolled in physics courses jumped after the completion of McCardell Bicentennial Hall. The six-year average of physics enrollment pre-Bicentennial Hall was 367. The average number of students enrolled in physics courses in the twelve years since the science building was completed is 498 students.
It was an influence for Deirdre Sackett, ’13, a neuroscience major now studying drug addiction and decision-making in rats at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Sackett wrote in an email that, “BiHall is a beautiful, state-of-the-art facility.”
It is also tied to an investment by the College in high-quality science faculty; this year the college hired five new faculty members within the sciences. For Sackett, the accessibility of research opportunities and faculty was key.
“Undergraduates receive so much attention from professors in the course of their research - something that is unheard of at large research institutions,” Sackett wrote.
“I owe my aptitude as a neuroscientist to Middlebury’s neuroscience program and the amazing professors that helped me along the way.”
“I wanted a small school, a good community feel,” wrote Hannah Newman ’13 in an email. “I wanted to be able to ask my professors questions in class, have small labs, and feel comfortable going to office hours and saying hello in the hallways. Looking back, I suppose that I saw being a natural science major at a place like Middlebury to be a good thing.”
However, for Alison Cook ’16, the pull was neither the faculty nor the infrastructure.
“It really came down to the environment I wanted to be in, and the type of people I wanted to be surrounded by,” Cook said. “I think sometimes as scientists we get so bogged down in our work that we fail to look at things globally or even holistically. At a school like Middlebury, everyone has a diverse set of interests that they bring to the table.”
Perhaps, the College has become a more attractive place to study the natural sciences precisely because it is a liberal arts college, and not a research university or a technical institute. Or perhaps, as Cluss commented, the upswing in science majors is part of a larger nationwide trend. Regardless of the driving force, it is apparent that the College has noticed.
“We are still looking to grow our science faculty a little bit next year,” Cluss said. “We’re adding a position in both physics and in chemistry and biochemistry. The chemistry and biochemistry position will enable us to teach smaller sections in some of our lower level courses, which we see as a way to improve the pedagogy and to create more options for our students as they move through the major.”
Having been at the college since 1986, Cluss has seen the potential for some major growth in the science departments throughout the years.
“For those of us that have been here for 25 years it’s really been exciting. We’ve all worked hard for this,” he said.
(05/09/13 3:52pm)
Soon the campus will empty. Dorm rooms will be stripped down and cleared out, cars will be packed, Commencement caps will fly in the air and the academic year will be done. The custodial staff will busy themselves scrubbing the campus from top to bottom, and then Language Schools will open their doors. Along with the Language School students, more than 100 Middlebury students will remain on campus to do summer research.
In McCardell Bicentennial Hall, research students will be working on projects that extend across the disciplines. Nicholas Caminiti ’15 will be working in the lab of Burr Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Rick Bunt’s lab, continuing the thesis work of Eric Roberts ’13. Roberts “was able to prove that [a] catalysis [reaction] proceeds through a reversible mechanism. [This summer] I will be testing the reaction under a variety of different conditions — different solvents and different temperatures — in order to further understand this reversibility,” wrote Caminiti in an email.
David Stillman ’14 will also be on campus this summer in the lab of John G. McCullough Professor of Chemistry Sunhee Choi, studying the biochemistry of Amyloid-ß, “a small peptide that aggregates into neurotoxic oligomers and senile plaques, which are diagnostic of Alzheimer’s,” explained Stillman in an email.
Choi and Stillman will be studying the interactions that occur between several metal ions and Amyloid-ß to elucidate the processes behind the development of Alzheimer’s disease. “We are currently investigating the effects of Cu(II) and Zn(II) on the kinetics of glycation of Aß with ribose-5-phosphate. This summer, we hope to continue to learn more about the relationship between Aß and its possible co-factors and rates of glycation and aggregation, while also characterizing the Aß metal-binding active site,” wrote Stillman.
Stillman and Caminiti will be working full time for a significant portion of the summer on their respective research projects. They will work side-by-side with faculty mentors, but over the course of the summer the project will begin to feel very much like their own.
The Office of Undergraduate Research notes on its website that “research has been identified as one of the top successful practices students can participate in during higher education. The in-depth study and implementation of a research project develops advanced skills that will translate beyond college.”
Research is such a valuable experience because it forces students to take the initiative and develop ideas independently. They take ownership over the project. As Caminiti noted, “research involves actually doing chemistry as opposed to simply learning about its various aspects [in the classroom]. The research involves [a process of] discovery. In the lab, we’re experimenting to learn about aspects of chemistry that are not currently understood. We’ll actually be contributing to the body of scientific knowledge, which is an incredible thing [to be able to do as an undergraduate].”
As rewarding as it can be, research during the academic year can be challenging. It’s difficult to balance the host of other commitments that come with being at Middlebury. The summer is a time to engage with the research full time, without trying to juggle classes and extracurricular activities too. There’s a different mindset on campus during the summer. “The chemistry department fosters a really close, supportive community and a relaxed, creative atmosphere. And Middlebury [has the] resources, equipment and mentors to allow undergraduates to truly contribute something meaningful to our knowledge of the world,” said Stillman
But summer research has an added bonus: Middlebury in the summer. Stillman is an enthusiastic proponent of the experience: “It’s gorgeous every day – it literally rained twice last summer – and the English-speakers on campus are really tight-knit. You get to experience all Middlebury has to offer without the constraints of [academic work].”
(05/02/13 4:01am)
I was browsing the Sites Dot Middlebury blog, “Core and Change in the Liberal Arts,” — an online hub for this conversation on campus — and I noticed that there has been no conversation about science requirements on campus, despite the proposed discussion topic. Well, I would like to weigh into that conversation now — belatedly I know — but better late than never.
Elsewhere on the blog site, I found a broad range of definitions for a liberal arts education. The definitions that resonated most with me were those that addressed the necessity of the liberal arts “to produce engaged citizens who can think critically about the world around them,” citizens who can “pursue an active life and be informed in public discourse.”
A goal of the liberal arts education, they suggested, is to create citizens who can critically engage the world and use that engagement to participate in public discourse in a meaningful way. Why is that such an appealing goal of a liberal arts education? Aristotle’s admonishment, “the neglect of education does harm to the constitution” comes to mind. A fear of the sciences, however, has seemed to cultivate a new form of educational neglect.
When I think about the world we live in today, I am struck by how reliant we are on the hard sciences. Nearly everything we interact with on a daily basis has been touched in some way — whether for better or for worse, I will not judge — by physics, chemistry and biology. Modern medicine. Modern agriculture. Communication technology. Building infrastructure. One would be hard-pressed to find an aspect of our modern life not impacted by scientific discoveries from these broad disciplines.
But how much of that interaction do we understand, even at a very basic level?
How able are we, as citizens, to think critically about the products churned out as a result of scientific inquiry? Should we not have an elementary understanding of molecular interactions in the body, so that we can grasp the impacts of a new drug? Or an understanding of the basic chemistry behind fertilizer production, so that we understand what we’re potentially putting on our food and by extension into our bodies? Should we not have a functional understanding of genetics so that we can engage meaningfully in the dialogues around genetic modification of agricultural products and medical diagnostics? Should we not understand the science behind global temperature regulation if we are to advocate for the reduction of fossil fuel consumption?
An active and engaged citizen in a world so influenced by science must have obtained a basic level of scientific knowledge and an intimate understanding of the scientific process. Such a citizen must understand the mode of questioning, the development of a testable hypothesis, the objective testing of that hypothesis and the resultant revisions to said hypothesis.
Are we gaining that understanding here at Middlebury? I would argue that we’re not. Of the eight distribution requirements (seven of which must be fulfilled), only one encourages an engagement with the vast body of scientific knowledge and the intricate and demanding mode of scientific investigation.
For those who don’t opt out of the SCI requirement, those who are brave enough to venture into the realm of the intro-level science courses, the experience can be a miserable one. As a friend said recently, “the learning curve in an intro-level science class is steep and daunting.” Unless a student is planning to major in the sciences, one can easily imagine them saying: why bother?
Though I have not thought long enough or hard enough about the distribution requirements and introductory science classes to thoroughly analyze and critique their utility, I would like to make a broad proposal. I propose that an overhaul of both the distribution requirement system and the introductory science curriculum is in order.
It strikes me that the average non-science major at Middlebury will not graduate with enough exposure to science to be able to critically engage on the myriad of scientific issues with societal relevance that we will be confronted with when we graduate, to say nothing of the intellectual perspective one gains by fundamentally understanding physical reality.
The problem is two-fold: 1) Middlebury students are not forced to engage with the sciences to the extent they should and 2) The introductory curriculums across the scientific disciplines are not necessarily designed to engage students looking to obtain a basic level of scientific literacy without the time commitment of a lab class.
To annotate that last point: the Introduction to Neuroscience course that will be offered next fall, Physics 155 (An Introduction to the Universe) and Natural Science and the Environment all seem to be courses aimed at a broader audience. They represent a step in the right direction. But the College needs more of those overview courses that touch upon topics in science with implications for society, and engagement with those courses must be required. Such courses will give students a base of knowledge to work with when we step outside of the College and into a world dominated by science.
Such changes will not be easy to make, but if the College wishes to continue educating engaged and well-rounded citizens, it is a necessary step — one that is well worth the time and energy commitment necessary to overhaul the current system.
(04/25/13 4:01am)
On Friday, April 12, Paul Donnelly ’15, Matei Epure ’16 and Chris Matteri ’13 travelled to Siena College in Loudonville, New York, to compete in the 18th annual Conference of the Northeast Region of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges (CCSCNE 2013).
The three Middlebury students came out among the top; they placed second in a field of 33 teams from schools across the Northeast.
Daniel Scharstein, professor of computer science and chair of the computer science department, noted in an email that he was pleased by the strong Middlebury performance: “The CCSC contest is a regional contest [and] in past years, Middlebury’s team has won this contest several times (though not in the last three or four years).”
The competition is just one of several to which Middlebury sends a team. Another competition Middlebury competed in past years is the Association for Computing Machinery(ACM)-International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). The competition’s website touts the ACM-ICPC as “the oldest, largest and most prestigious programming contest in the world.”
Though the Middlebury team hasn’t done particularly well in past years, Scharstein is optimistic that with the spike in computer science enrollments and an influx of experience, the team will be competitive in the future.
A host of Middlebury students and two professors, Scharstein and Frank Swenton, professor of mathematics, are competing in the Google Code Jam, an international competition designed to bring together professional and amateur programmers alike to solve tough coding problems. This year, 21,278 people participated in the first round with 17,000 advancing to the next round (including all of the Middlebury participants). In the following round, only 3,000 will advance.
Tom Dobrow ’16, one of the students competing in the Google Code Jam, spoke of his eagerness to continue competing in coding competitions.
“I heard of [the contest] only a few days before the competition from my professor who offered extra credit to students who could advance past the qualifier round,” he said. “The first round was very casual, with little pressure, but apparently all subsequent rounds are very challenging. I don’t think any of us expect to get much further in the competition. [However], I look forward to doing competitions like this in the future, especially those where I can compete on a Middlebury team.”
Matteri, a member of the second-place team at CCSCNE, benefited from the competitive coding.
“These contests help me realize how much I still have to learn as a coder, since being forced to code under pressure reveals what you know well and what could use improvement,” he wrote in an email.
The benefits of knowing how to code and competing at a high level extend beyond the mere personal intellectual challenge. Technology is an integral part of everyday life and coders are the innovators and the inventors when it comes to how society uses the available technology. Good coders are at a premium, and yet “it is interesting (and disconcerting) that of the 500 participants last year in the semifinal round [of the Google Code Jam], only 25 were Americans,” wrote Swenton.
He continued, ”As the world continues deeper into the Information Age, the U.S. is not producing even close to enough good programmers to fill the demand present in the job market. I think this is a great thing for students to participate in — it’s competitive, it’s fun, it gives them a reason to hone and practice extremely valuable skills, and, if they do well enough, it can help to pave the road to a great job.”
(04/21/13 7:29pm)
Walking out of Davis Family Library the other day, I overheard a professor consoling a frantic senior with the following: “What you’ve got to keep in mind about your thesis is that it’s your first work, not your last one." His comment brought to mind a line from Plato’s Symposium that discusses the birth of ideas as intellectual children: “Everyone would rather have such children than human ones, and would look up to Homer, Hesiod, and the other good poets with envy and admiration for the offspring they have left behind.”
The senior thesis represents a student’s first original work, what Plato would refer to as their first intellectual “offspring.” Run with this line of thought, and next week’s theses presentations in McCardell Bicentennial Hall are all the more cause for celebration. An intellectual child has been born, and we will be lucky enough to bear witness to the event.
The projects are representative of the exciting work done on a daily basis in Bicentennial Hall. Eric Roberts ’13, a chemistry major working in the lab of Burr Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Rick Bunt, has been trying to explain some surprising results from the thesis research of Nat Nelson ’11.
The results involved some unexpected structural changes in the products of a reaction Nelson ran. A chemical structure can have multiple physical orientations, even if it is made up of the same components. Think of the left and right hands: each is composed of four fingers and a thumb, but they don’t have the same structure. Rather, they are mirror images of each other. Chemical structures work in a similar way; when a reaction occurs and it generates a product, there can be multiple physical orientations of that product, and each one can serve a different function.
These different structures are called enantiomers. Chemists use catalysts to ensure that they only get a specific type of enantiomer in a given reaction. In his thesis work, Nelson found that a certain catalyst wasn’t creating the expected ratio of enantiomers over time. Or rather, it was initially, but then the products were changing, morphing in some way, to change the enantiomer ratio.
“Nelson was seeing … a loss of enantiopurity — [the existence of only a single enantiomer] — that didn’t make sense,” said Roberts. “He proposed two possible explanations: 1) It was a reversible reaction … or 2) there was a huge build-up of the first enantiomer, then over time, there would be some factor that would grow the quantity of the other enantiomer. We went in to test [the reversibility hypothesis], and we found that it was [correct].”
Deirdre Sackett ’13 and Kyle Harrold ’13, both neuroscience majors. are working in the lab of Assistant Professor of Psychology Mark Stefani. They’re examining schizophrenia in rats and the effects of a variety of compounds on the condition.
“Our lab focuses on the cognitive deficits in adult male rats with symptoms of schizophrenia and possible ways to ameliorate or worsen them,” said Sackett. They use a battery of tests — analogs of the Wisconsin Card Sort Task, mazes and object recognition to “test different aspects of cognition in rats.” These behavioral tests focus on cognitive flexibility.
“Imagine I gave you a deck of cards, and I told you to start sorting them,” explained Harrold. “I’d give you feedback, either correct or incorrect, about your sorting pattern, and eventually you’d figure out the rule. You could do that, and a schizophrenic patient could do that. But if I all of a sudden changed the rule, and started giving you different feedback, you would be able to adjust your behavior, but a schizophrenic patient would continue sorting by the first rule.”
Sackett added, “that type of behavior … is called perseveration. It may seem like a small deal with regards to a card game, but translated into social and vocational life, it’s a huge inhibition.”
Malcolm Littlefield ’13, an environmental studies-chemistry major, has been researching surfactant-modified clays all year in the lab of Associate Professor of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Environmental Studies Molly Costanza-Robinson. He is examining the ability of clays that have had their surface modified to act as a sponge for organic contaminants.
The first phase of his project involved the characterization of the surfactant-modified clays, which was “purely analysis of the surfactant-modified clays, with no contaminants – total carbon chromatography, x-ray diffraction, and sodium release were our three methods of characterization for the clays.” According to Littlefield, “that all wrapped up very nicely.”
But then Littlefield “hit an unexpected speed bump in the analysis.” It turned out that the methods Littlefield initially wanted to use to measure absorption – the amount of contaminant soaked up by the clay – weren’t effective. So he, Costanza-Robinson and a second thesis student, Annie Mejaes ’13, spent the spring trying to work out the kinks in the adsorption data collection methods, and finally, it looks like they’re back on track.
“There will be two students this summer working on collecting all this adsorption data. It will be a couple months later than expected, but there will be lots of good adsorption data to write about shortly,” said Littlefield.
Littlefield isn’t heading immediately to graduate school, and he has no regrets about his undergraduate experience, either. “I don’t think I would change anything if I were to do my undergraduate degree again,” he said. He is also quick to acknowledge the benefits of undergraduate research work: “I’ve completely lost my fear of the trial and error process as a mode of research … You can try out any idea that you have, and if it works, great, if it doesn’t, then you can still often learn a lot about why your idea didn’t work.”
Of the three other profiled thesis students, Sackett is the only one who is enrolled in graduate school next year, where she plans to continue with research along parallel lines of the work she’s done at Middlebury. However, both Roberts and Harrold echoed Littlefield’s sentiments.
Bunt added: “In the sciences it’s really nice [to do thesis work] because its such a capstone experience where you get to be in a lab and … you get to invent and discover new knowledge. It’s on a small scale, but that’s what’s fun about it. You’re doing things that no one has ever done before.”
(03/21/13 4:00am)
It was almost comical. One of the custodial staff was in the Battell bathroom as I brushed my teeth early one morning during winter term. “You haven’t seen a tree, have you?” she asked, peering into the shower stalls. “No, I haven’t,” I replied, both puzzled and bemused. Coincidentally, I had an interview with Tim Parsons, the College’s landscape horticulturalist later that day to discuss his “Trees in the Urban Forest” class, so I filed the encounter away to mention to him.
It turned out that the tree in question, a small oak sapling that had been pulled out of the ground on the night of Jan. 15 in the small quad between Battell and Carr Hall, was not the only victim that night. A nearby lilac had also been uprooted. But this was not an isolated event, either. When I asked Parsons about it, he told me that it was one in a long line of vandalism incidents that began to noticeably increase in number in the fall of 2009.
Parsons has compiled a list of all the events since 2009. In that time frame, there have been at least 31 weekends when vandalism occurred and over 50 different vandalism events in that time frame.
“Most of the damage seems to be in the fall and winter term. If you look at all these dates, there never seems to be all that much in the spring,” said Parsons in an interview last week. “[Apart from those] two trees pulled up out of the ground [midweek] during winter term this year, almost all the [vandalism occurs] on the weekend. And of course, I don’t know if it’s Friday night, Saturday night, or Sunday night. But there have been times when it’s so bad, Monday morning first thing, I cruise the campus looking specifically for tree vandalism.”
The damage ranges from cosmetic to fatal. The list Parsons has compiled documents snapped branches, savaged shrubs and whole saplings that have been uprooted.
“The vandalism is for the most part located around Atwater, Allen, Battell and along the road behind Proctor Dining Hall and the tennis courts,” said Parsons. “It would be hard to quantify the impact on the urban forest as a whole, but certainly there’s an entire row of trees that all have been broken in the last four or five years, and now they have big wounds on the side, they’re misshapen. From a tree’s perspective, they now have these big wounds that they have to work out how to cope with. Their growth will be affected. And really, from a landscaping perspective, it doesn’t look very good.”
Brian Marland ’15 took “Trees in the Urban Forest,” the winter term class taught by Parsons, this past January and ended up writing his final paper on tree vandalism on campus. He noticed the trend of weekend incidents and was curious to examine a possible correlation with weekend alcohol consumption. “I found a lot of psychological evidence that suggested that alcohol increases aggression. Perhaps tree vandalism is an outlet for that pent-up aggression,” said Marland in an interview last week.
“Almost all of the tree vandalism on Middlebury’s campus occurs late at night on weekends when students frequently drink alcohol and walk across campus in large numbers to parties in other buildings,” Marland wrote in his final paper for
“Trees of the Urban Forest.” He connects it to vandalism incidents that occur in urban settings around bars and nightclubs. He cites a Seattle example given by Marvin Black in The Journal of Arboriculture: “Most vandalized Seattle street trees are broken by males aged 17 to 25, mostly in connection with drunkenness or drug trips, and our major vandalism time is right after taverns close at 2 a.m., and for the next three hours’… On a residential campus such as Middlebury’s, dorm rooms are often the location of alcohol consumption and take the place of taverns from Black’s example.”
Parsons brought the issue of tree vandalism to the attention of the Community Council in 2010 with a formal presentation. He was frustrated by his inability to stop it. “It came up around the same time as conversations about dorm damage."
"The problem with the vandalism that I have is that I can’t bill students for broken branches,” said Parsons.But what bothers him more than anything is not the cost. “It’s the violence that concerns me,” he said. “I mean, I can’t emphasize enough, some of the damage that I’ve seen done, it took some pretty good brute strength that kind of frightens me in a way, especially down in the Atwater suites. It seems like that’s an area prone to dark corners and parties in back rooms. To have this [kind of violence] taking place as well … it doesn’t seem like a good mix. There’s been talk that the social scene on campus needs help. Well, I think this is some proof right here.”
“The most effective solutions seemed to be education and public awareness,” Marland noted. “I feel like at this school where there’s such an ethical consciousness around divestment and the environment, it makes sense to build a student consciousness around our own landscape.”
It is an issue of community, on multiple levels. On one level, tree vandalism impacts the ecological community of the urban forest. On another level, a vandalized campus impacts the ethos of the College’s community. And finally, it impacts the community of people who dedicate their livelihoods to maintaining this campus.
“The guys in our shop take great pride in the way they take care of this place,” Parsons observed. “They come up to a tree and they see a branch with a big rip in the bark right down the middle, or a sapling they’ve planted ripped out of the ground, and it just breaks their heart.”
(03/14/13 4:00am)
Creating a stimulating introductory-level science course is challenging. There’s a host of information thrown at students: terms to memorize, concepts to learn, lab techniques to familiarize oneself with. The prospect is daunting for some, terrifying for others. These courses are challenging and rigorous, especially for those who have no previous science background. It’s not for nothing that BIOL 145: Cell Biology and Genetics is often referred to as “Cell Hell.”
What is frustrating for science teachers is that the true nature of science can easily be lost in an introductory course. They are what Senior Associate in Science Instruction in Biology Vickie Backus calls “cookbook labs, where everything is laid out for you and you add one thing to another to get a purple liquid, and then you add a third thing and it blows up, and all that is expected.” In cookbook labs, there are right answers and wrong answers, and any deviation from expected results is abnormal.
But Associate in Science Instruction in Biology Susan DeSimone is dissatisfied with this strict format because “science that has been done by eighteen-thousand people before you, where you are trying to [derive] the answer you are supposed to get … that’s not real science.” DeSimone and Backus have been searching for alternatives for the introductory-level biology labs, particularly Cell Biology and Genetics, for some time.
They think they may have found the answer in the wild parsnip. It is an invasive, wild type of root vegetable that was once a staple crop in the northeast. The wild parsnip is becoming a serious problem in Vermont.
Middlebury College’s Landscape Horticulturist Tim Parsons writes in his blog “The Middlebury Landscape” that the parsnip is “a biennial — a rosette of leaves the first year, and flower stalks the second” that is particularly difficult to eradicate because “biennials are hell-bent on flowering in their second year… cut [them] down too early, and they form many smaller flowers, and therefore more seeds, than [if] left untouched … It thrives on roadsides, and in other poor growing locations because the rosettes are poor competitors in their first year and can’t keep up with a healthy stand of vegetation, such as grass ... Seeds of parsnip are viable in the soil for up to four years, so vigilance is required.”
The parsnip is not only a problem because it’s invasive and difficult to eradicate; it is also toxic. “It is a different toxin than poison ivy,” DeSimone said. “Poison ivy is an immune reaction, an allergic reaction. Wild parsnip works in a different way. As we understand it, everyone is susceptible to wild parsnip, because wild parsnip toxins are able to move directly into cells. If the tissue gets exposed to sunlight — the UV light, that’s the trigger — the sunlight catalyzes an interaction between the toxin and the DNA in the cell. And that interaction triggers cell death. What you end up seeing is a huge blister that looks like a second-degree burn, and then the skin peels away, and you’re left with a hyper-pigmentation scar — unique to parsnip burns — that can last anywhere from several months up to a year.”
Last spring, DeSimone played around in the lab and thought of better ways to teach the Cell Biology and Genetics lab just as the wild parsnip was leafing out. “[I] thought, well, what’s known about wild parsnip?” she said. “It’s important to have something relevant for students, and parsnip is definitely relevant for [anyone living in Vermont]. So I did a literature search. And it turns out there isn’t a lot known about it.”
The more DeSimone looked into wild parsnips, the more excited she became about its potential to revolutionize how the BIOL 145 lab is taught. “The challenge is finding a system where you can start to do some interesting questioning, but at the same time, find some real data,” she said. “I’ve been searching for that system since I’ve started teaching. And I think parsnip is it. [With the parsnip], we can take some relatively simple tools to start studying this, and almost any question people will come up with will be a novel question.”
DeSimone and Backus are now growing parsnips both in the lab on the fourth floor of McCardell Bicentennial Hall and in the greenhouse. They are examining wild and cultivated parsnips for differences in physical appearance, toxin concentrations and toxin components. Backus is also integrating the parsnip into one of the invasive species lab in BIOL 140: Ecology and Evolution.
“There has been a feeling in the past that what happens in the Ecology and Evolution course is in no way related to what happens in the Cell Biology and Genetics course — that these are completely different tracks, and so, why should I take both courses if I’m only interested in one of the fields?” Backus said. “What [the parsnip] is allowing us to do is bring [the two courses] closer together, so that the knowledge you gain in 140 can translate over to 145 and vice versa.”
According to teaching assistant for Cell Biology and Genetics Alison Cook, “poison parsnip is a good research topic because it is tangible. A lot of students have come into contact with poison parsnip whether they realize it or not, and understanding some of the science behind the resulting burn on a molecular or cellular level is fascinating. Research in this field is relatively limited, so students are actually exploring hypotheses that haven’t even been published yet. It gives the course a very real-world-science kind of feel.”
Backus expanded on this “real world science” feel: “[We’re doing real] research. We have no idea what’s going to happen with this stuff. It’s a challenge. Sometimes the data are messy. Sometimes the data produce internal contradictions. Part A and B lead you to opposite conclusions, and you have to somehow reconcile it. That’s what we do as biologists, as professional scientists. If you knew what the answer was, you wouldn’t be doing the experiment. It is akin to the kind of research you’d be doing in graduate school. You walk in, and there is something known about the system, some expertise in the lab, but you are finding not only the new answer, but the new question. You have to put together information and build on it in order to make something.”
The emphasis with this parsnip project is that the students in an introductory class are driving research forward in a novel area. But how successful is this novel approach compared to the old cookbook approach?
DeSimone noted that in recent conferences with students, “I had ten percent of my students who were totally jazzed. [They thought,] ‘OK, we don’t actually know the answer. I can really start to think. I’m not looking for the right answer — I’m looking for the logical answer as a possible explanation to take the work further.’ It is going to be a blast to teach, and way more meaningful for the students.”
(03/07/13 5:00am)
What does it mean to possess the genetic information of something or someone? Is the genetic code – the foundation of life from bacteria to homonids – a patentable product? Or is there a line somewhere, because genetic information is the stuff of life and life is sacrosanct, and patent law only goes to a point?
It’s an interesting and difficult question and a question that is particularly relevant today. A week and a half ago, on Feb. 19, the Supreme Court heard a case involving the biotechnology company Monsanto, and a small Indiana farmer, Vernon Hugh Bowman (Bowman v. Monsanto Company, No. 11-796).
Monsanto is suing Bowman, who owns a 300-acre soybean farm in Indiana, for saving and planting multiple generations of their patented, genetically modified “Roundup Ready” seeds. Andrew Pollack of the New York Times reported: “[Bowman] bought commodity soybeans from a grain elevator [for a second planting]. These beans were a mixture of varieties from different farmers, but, not surprisingly, most of them were Roundup Ready. So Mr. Bowman sprayed Roundup on his late-season crop. ‘All through history we have always been allowed to go to an elevator and buy commodity grain and plant it’ [Bowman] said in an interview.
The courts, however, have not agreed. After Monsanto sued Mr. Bowman in 2007, a district court in Indiana awarded the company more than $84,000.”
Bowman is being taken to court for planting seeds that contain the gene for Roundup Ready resistance without buying the seed from Monsanto. Monsanto is a biotechnology company, and they’ve devoted massive amounts of resources to the development of this line of seeds. To them, it’s a patent infringement case and for that reason, Monsanto has a broad range of support from diverse groups – from software companies to laboratory instrument manufacturers. Everyone is concerned about how this case will affect the future of commercial enterprise and innovation.
Charlotte Silver, an opinion writer for Al-Jazeera commented that: “According to court reports, the panel of judges was less than amenable to farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman’s argument that the purview of Monsanto’s patent ends once its seeds have yielded their first generation of a crop. Monsanto sees it differently, arguing that it must be able to prevent farmers from using seeds obtained from subsequent generations of plants. That the Supreme Court would resist Bowman’s argument should come as no surprise. After all it was the Supreme Court that, in 1985, granted seed companies the right to limit farmers’ ability to save the seeds the companies had patented.”
But is there another angle we should be examining?
What has been for centuries free for farmers – the seed planted from last year’s crop – is now becoming a patented, profitable commodity, and a lucrative one at that. According to a report from the Associated Press in the New York Times on Jan. 8 this year, “The company’s sales grew 21 percent, to $2.9 billion in the quarter, with most of the increase coming from the company’s corn seed business.” The report goes on to indicate that “Sales of the company’s largest unit, seeds and genomics, grew 27 percent, to $1.1 billion, on demand from farmers in Brazil and Argentina.”
Is this right?
Silver criticizes Monsanto for exporting their biotechnology to developing countries in South America, Asia and Africa. She wrote: “Prominent food justice activist and defender of seed biodiversity, Vandana Shiva, described AGRA as a major assault on Africa’s seed sovereignty for its encouragement of biotechnology in African countries. In 2009, three years after Gates launched his AGRA initiative, Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, published the first independent study on transgenic crop yields. It concluded that biotechnology has not resulted in increased yields, and, in fact, traditional and organic breeding techniques have a much more successful track record.”
Apart from sub-par yield performance, herbicide-resistant crops are giving rise to new problems. Weeds are slowly becoming resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup pesticide. Silver wrote; “A recent report published in January by Farm Industry News found that the number of farmers reporting Roundup-resistant weeds is rapidly increasing. In 2012, nearly half of all US farmers interviewed found super weeds on their farms, a considerable increase from the 34 percent reporting such weeds in 2011. Although Monsanto’s first generation of transgenic soybeans and the concomitant herbicides are responsible for the development of these brawny weeds, it will try to convince farmers that their second generation of herbicides will provide the solution.”
This last issue begs the question: should we mess with nature’s systems? Many would argue no. But the promise of biotechnology is undeniable, and the march of progress is inevitable. In the absence of a complete halt of technological advancement, I would argue that our priority right now would be holding a conversation as a society about which aspects of progress are ethical and which are not. And the only way that such a conversation can be meaningful is if it is grounded in strong scientific understanding.
The debate must be approached respectfully, humbly, with curiosity, as, in the words of Aristotle, “the person who deliberates seems to inquire and analyze in the way described as though he were analyzing a geometrical construction, “with the aim of answering the question: what is right? Because it’s not only the Supreme Court who should be engaging these issues. We all need to engage them on a daily basis. They will impact our lives profoundly.
(02/28/13 5:00am)
Trickling water echoes softly through the glass room overflowing with a riot of lush green vegetation. In one corner, potted orchids perch alongside an old hot tub in which goldfish placidly float. A Norfolk Island pine towers to the sloping ceiling. The McCardell Bicentennial Hall greenhouse is a tropical oasis floating six floors up from the frozen mid-February ground.
The greenhouse, also known as the Brook Botany room, is divided into two rooms. The eastern room is the College’s plant conservatory, and houses plants from across the continents: banana, cacao, vanilla, coffee, Southwestern succulents and East Asian orchids. The west room is devoted to plant propagation and College-related research projects. Currently, it’s occupied by a host of parsnips and soybeans growing alongside plant clippings in various stages of development.
Patti Padua, the greenhouse curator, says that the conservatory is really “a museum of plants … I’ve been adding to it over the years, based on input from professors and my own preferences. I really enjoy economic botany, so I have lots of plants of economic importance.” This explains the choice of housing plants such as coffee, cacao and vanilla.
Padua has overseen greenhouse operations since she arrived at the greenhouse in April of 2004. She graduated from the University of Vermont with a degree in plant and soil science. She worked for five years in the UVM greenhouse. She now owns the Cobble Creek Nursery in Monkton, Vt. with her husband, where she grows trees and shrubs.
As greenhouse curator, Padua’s job “is to make sure that the plants are all growing vigorously, and doing whatever that would entail. But I’m very part-time here. I probably only put in about eight hours a week. I’ve got all the plants on an every other day schedule. I have a student who waters on the weekends for me.”
Associate in Science Instruction in Biology Susan Desimone is growing wild and cultivated parsnips for an experiment in cell biology and genetics. The greenhouse recently salvaged her project.
“We have some plants for BIOL0145 growing in the green house and down in the lab too,” Desimone wrote. “We left some in the green house because we didn’t have space on our grow set downstairs and because Patti Padua does such a fantastic job, we thought they would do well. Lucky thing for us, since we got a thrip infestation in the plants downstairs!” Thrips are small insects that are often considered pests.
Desimone’s parsnip project isn’t the only one using the greenhouse. The Solar Decathlon Project was using the space during winter term to test out an automated watering system. A psychology student is currently using the greenhouse to study the effects of nature on student psyche. Associate in Science Instruction in Environmental Studies Marc Lapin uses the greenhouse for his natural science and the environment class. “We have been using the greenhouse for two experiments, one regarding genetically modified (GMO) crops and the other regarding nitrogen-fixing bacteria,” wrote Lapin in an email. “Both experiments are related to our unit on agriculture.”
By all accounts, the greenhouse is thriving under Padua’s watchful eye. She attributes its success to the Integrated Pest Management strategy she employs. A brochure distributed by the UVM Entomology Research Laboratory states that “Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is a way to control insect pests and diseases on crops by combining several complementary strategies such as sanitation, pest detection and biological control. Chemical pesticides may be used, but only when absolutely necessary.”
Padua adds, “I’m [currently] using green lacewing to control the long-tail mealie bug and aphids, which could be a potential problem in here if I let it get out of hand. When I took over, the greenhouse was inundated with bugs, but now I’ve got a healthy suppression of the population. Keep in mind, the goal isn’t eradication, simply management.”
The long-tail mealie bug has been a particular problem on some of the succulents, including one of Padua’s favorites, the Carrion flower.
“It’s a cacti, not much to look at. But when it does bloom, its blossom – maybe 8-10 inches across, red and very vein-y – smells like rotten meat.,” she said. “It uses the smell to attract pollinators. I never have a fly in the greenhouse, then when it blooms, the flies just swarm to it and the greenhouse stinks for a good week to 10 days. I put a sign up to warn people.”
Such specimens are kept for their curiosity factor more than anything. “I like to take this room and make it a place for people to get excited about plants. There’s no plant science or botany major here, so it’s not necessarily people who are going to school for this. My real goal is to spark some interest in people or a passion [for plants].”
(02/21/13 5:00am)
It’s a big week for science. The top New York Times headline Monday morning read: “Obama Seeking to Boost the Study of the Human Brain.” Normally, such headlines are relegated to the Science Times, where only people like me will read them. But this story was deemed front page-worthy. It will change our lives in ways we can’t imagine, just as the Human Genome Project did.
The author of the article, John Markoff, reported: “The project, which the administration has been looking to unveil as early as March, will include federal agencies, private foundations and teams of neuroscientists and nanoscientists in a concerted effort to advance the knowledge of the brain’s billions of neurons and gain greater insights into perception, actions and, ultimately, consciousness.” The money — potentially as much as three billion dollars — and government support will be a “game changer.” It could bring together disparate research teams under one banner. It could foster the innovation of new research technologies and strategies. The possibilities are exciting. “One,” Markoff wrote, “is to build a complete model map of brain activity by creating fleets of molecule-size machines to noninvasively act as sensors to measure and store brain activity at the cellular level. The proposal envisions using synthetic DNA as a storage mechanism for brain activity.”
While synthetic DNA as a storage mechanism for information may sound far-fetched and science-fiction, it’s already being done. The European Bioinformatics Institute had managed to store digital information in DNA molecules and more research is being done to perfect the practice and make large scale data storage more practical.
On Jan. 28, the New York Times reported on the Institute’s work: “The amount of data, 739 kilobytes all told, is hardly prodigious by today’s microelectronic storage standards: all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, a scientific paper, a color digital photo of the researchers’ laboratory, a 26-second excerpt from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and a software algorithm. Nor is this the first time digital information has been stored in DNA. But the researchers said their new technique, which includes error-correction software, was a step toward a digital archival storage medium of immense scale. Their goal is a system that will safely store the equivalent of one million CDs in a gram of DNA for 10,000 years.”
It’s been more than a big week. It’s been a big couple of months for science generally, but DNA in particular. A recent study highlighted in the Times on Jan. 16 and 28, “Mouse Study Discovers DNA That Controls Behavior” and “Tracing the Roots of Behavior in DNA” argues that “the architectural feats of animals … offer an opportunity for scientists to tackle the profoundly difficult question of how genes control complicated behavior in animals and humans.” The study, which examined burrow architecture in two types of mice, “[identified] four regions of DNA that play a major role in telling a mouse how long a burrow to dig and whether to add an escape tunnel.”
The fact that specific behaviors can be targeted to a small handful of regions in the genetic code is a significant development because it’s one step away from being able to identify the exact genes that influence behavior. And though understanding the link between behavior and genetics in mice is a far cry from that same understanding in humans, it’s a step towards a very profound understanding of the human experience.
A deeper understanding of genetics, and the human genome in particular, has led to leaps in medical treatments. On Dec. 9, the New York Times published an article about a novel treatment for leukemia that uses a disabled form of HIV to infect T-cells – a type of white blood cell – with a gene that causes the T-cells to attack and kill cancerous cells. The Times wrote: “Researchers say the same approach, reprogramming the patient’s immune system, may also eventually be used against tumors like breast and prostate cancer. To perform the treatment, doctors remove millions of the patient’s T-cells … and insert new genes that enable the T-cells to kill cancer cells. The technique employs a disabled form of H.I.V. because it is very good at carrying genetic material into T-cells. The new genes program the T-cells to attack B-cells, a normal part of the immune system that turns malignant in leukemia. The altered T-cells — called chimeric antigen receptor cells — are then dripped back into the patient’s veins, and if all goes well they multiplyand start destroying the cancer.”
But what’s the moral of this story?
We live in an age that is dominated by science, whether we care to acknowledge its presence or not. The work that’s being done in the fields of genetics, bioinformatics, neuroscience and medicine will, I believe, revolutionize our world in the next two decades. Discoveries in these fields give us as a species, the ability to understand ourselves in a profound way. And, those discoveries are providing us with the tools to drastically change the way we live, oftentimes for the better. But as Einstein noted: “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” We often fall short on the ethical considerations when it comes to any new technology.
The College emblem is engraved with two words: Scientia et Virtus. Knowledge and virtue. And what is science, if not the pursuit of knowledge powered by a driving curiosity about the world? But knowledge without virtue is a dangerous thing. I think it is our duty, as students at Middlebury College, to pursue a deeper understanding of science alongside the Socratic quest to know the nature of virtue, so that we can make the right decision, the logical and ethical decision, around the powerful technologies emerging from modern science. Who knows? Maybe the College’s own hydrogen-powered tractor will be the New York Times’s next front-page science headline.
(02/13/13 11:28pm)
Valenetine’s Day is here, and even over in McCardell Bicentennial Hall, talk has turned towards love. This past Tuesday, Philip Battell/Sarah Stewart Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Jeff Byers gave a talk on “Love, Pain, and Chocolate: Musings of a Structural Scientist on the True Meaning of Valentine’s Day.”
But Byers admits in an email that “the talk I give is mostly a sneaky way to get people to think in general about how and why drugs work.”
He discussed opiates (“to show how and why very similar looking molecules can have very similar effects, and the evolutionary reasons why this is the case”) then ranged over the active compounds in chocolate – caffeine and phenethyl amine – and discussed a molecule called anandamide, which activates cannabinoid receptors, which are associated with pain and pleasure.
Hopefully those who attended ended up seriously contemplating “how and why drugs work.” Introducing even a single chemical into the complex system that is our body can have dramatic repercussions. It’s a powerful idea.
Maybe less apparent, though perhaps more profound: the chemicals that our own body creates can directly influence our behavior, our interactions with one another.
Let’s run with the Valentine’s Day theme here. Pause for a second to ponder this: love is not a chemical introduced into our bodies from the outside.
It is an emotion that wells up from within. We’ve all felt that heartstring tug, perhaps particularly acute this time of year. But what’s it all about? Why and how does it work?
A quick Google search (keyword: “the biochemistry of love”) yields an interesting array of articles. I was particularly intrigued by one published by the Nature Publishing Group, “The biochemistry of love: an oxytocin hypothesis.”
The authors, Sue Carter and Stephen W. Porges argue that “love is clearly not ‘just’ an emotion; it is a biological process … Social interactions between individuals … trigger cognitive and physiological processes that influence emotional and mental states.”
Love is a biological process, and biology is chemistry on a grand scale. So love is, at its most fundamental level, a chemical process.
The chemicals are oxytocin, a nine-amino acid peptide synthesized in the hypothalamus, and its partner in crime, vasopressin. They are two peptides – proteins, chains of amino acids – associated with the numerous behaviors and emotions that can be qualified as “love.”
And not just “romantic love.” Their presence is proven to be associated with parenting, protective behaviors and long-lasting reciprocal relationships – all associated with a different form of love. Agape, if you will.
Which is to say that the macromolecule chemistry of our own bodies influences our behavior towards those closest to us.
What’s the lesson from that statement, the takeaway?
Here it is: Science can help us understand, at a fundamental level, who and what we are. It can help to explain why we do the things we do. Which is why each and every one of us, regardless of whether we attended Byers’ talk, should take an interest in “the science of us.”
What frequently turns people away from science is that it is jargon-intensive. There are lots of factoids. But taking an interest in science is less about learning all the factoids and more about taking an interest in the thought process, the scientific method.
“The essence of science has more to do with its motivations and methods than with its conclusions,” explained Joseph Putko ’13, a physics major, in an email. “‘Scientific literacy’ has more to do with a thought process than with knowing scientific ‘facts.’ The primary motivation of science is wanting to know. The primary method is questioning. So, scientific literacy is sort of a marriage between wonder and skepticism.”
Carl Sagan was a renowned science writer who argued passionately for a greater appreciation for and understanding of science in society.
He wrote: “Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts. It urges on us a fine balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything — new ideas and established wisdom. We need wide appreciation of this kind of thinking. It works. It’s an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change. Our task is not just to train more scientists but also to deepen public understanding of science.”
Science gives us a window into a very profound level of our being. So this Valentine’s Day, whether caught up in romantic endeavors or bemoaning a lack of them, we should pause and think about Byers’ “how and why.” It’s not just for the select few on this campus who attended the Byers lecture. The inner workings of our being concern us all.
(01/24/13 2:31am)
The class gathered outside of Voter, looking up at the wire strung between two diverging trunks of an elm. “You see that wire, the slack there? In the summer, when the tree leafs out, it will pull the wire taught. That slack is a good thing this time of year,” explained Tim Parsons, Middlebury College’s Landscape Horticulturalist. The class, Trees and the Urban Forest, was in the middle of an outdoor lab and soon they wandered over to examine the root structure and corresponding lean of a sugar maple along College Street.
“All these sugar maples were planted at roughly the same time, and now they’re all dying at the same time. We took out one just down the hill last summer,” Parsons said, continuing with the lesson.
This is the second time Trees in the Urban Forest has been offered as a winter term course. Parsons first taught the course three years ago in the winter of 2010. The class, designed to be a broad interdisciplinary overview of trees, meets three days a week for two hours in a classroom, and then outside for a lab that runs several hours each week. They use the College’s campus tree menagerie of nearly 100 different tree species as its textbook.
“[The course] starts with tree biology, tree structure, and how trees grow. It moves into tree care, how to select and maintain them,” said Parsons. “Then we start stepping back a little further, and we look at urban forest design and the various impacts of trees in an urban forest. We’re going to fool around with some GIS work on tree mapping and how to maintain an inventory. I hope to get to some computer modeling of tree populations in an urban environment; there are computer programs now where you input a certain population of trees, and it will come back with the amount of carbon sequestration these trees do, the dollar amount for storm water abatement, for pollution absorption and energy conservation. When you start thinking about the roles trees play in an urban setting, they do quite a bit. It’s an interesting topic for a course because urban trees do so many things; you can bring a lot of different disciplines into the discussion.”
Graham Shaw ’16 wrote in an email: “Trees in the Urban Forest was a class I took on a whim. I've always thought trees are pretty and make nice additions to any landscape, but that was about the only thing pushing me into the class. Tim Parson's teaching has taught me a newfound appreciation for the importance of trees both aesthetically and environmentally.”
Katie Schide ’14 added, “Taking a class with Tim Parsons has been an incredibly unique opportunity. His passion for trees, especially those at Middlebury, is contagious. After just two weeks of class, I already see the campus in a completely different way. I think the whole class has gained a ton of appreciation for the tree maintenance and landscaping that happens on this campus everyday. So much care and planning goes into each tree on campus and Tim is at the heart of it all. When he plants a new tree, he is planning the landscape of campus for decades to come. This class has helped me gain a better appreciation not only for the landscapers, but for all the people whose work at Middlebury is often overlooked.”
Parsons moved to Vermont from his home state of Connecticut to attend the University of Vermont, where he graduated from in ’89. He co-majored in Plant and Soil Science (with a focus in Landscape Design) and Environmental Studies. After school, he worked in garden centers around the state, ran a garden center in New Haven, and worded independently in landscaping. He came to the College in 2006 to work in Landscaping Services as the College’s Landscape Horticulturalist. He also writes a blog called the Middlebury Landscape.
“Basically, I’m a tree geek,” he said with a grin.
One of the course emphases is on managing the various stresses on trees in an urban environment.
“We need our trees. We need shade. We need them for carbon sequestration. The question is: how can we manage and maintain our urban canopy to keep as many trees as we can as long as we can? If you take a tree away from its natural environment, you’re introducing different stresses to that tree. That’s a big part of what the class is about, how can you manage these trees and the stress of an urban environment to keep them as healthy as you can as long as you can?” said Parsons.
Trees at the College are exposed to numerous “stress factors.” They grow in impacted, compressed soils. They are exposed to high levels of salt run-off in the spring. In recent years, there have been numerous disturbing instances of tree vandalism. Just last Thursday morning, two small trees were found dug up and strewn across the sidewalk between Battell and Forest.
But Parsons wants his class to think beyond the College’s campus. To that end, the final project will involve urban forest management in the town of Middlebury. The emerald ash borer, a pest that kills ash trees, is progressing north towards Middlebury. Parsons and his class will fill out the State of Vermont’s Forest Pest Preparedness Plan, and map the ash trees that are within “striking” distance of town roads. Their final will involve submitting a proposal for the management of trees that are likely to be affected by the emerald ash borer to the town.
But the class has students thinking beyond Middlebury in other ways too.
“Beyond all of the interesting things I'm learning about trees and landscaping, being in class with Tim has made me more eager than ever to find a job that makes me happy,” said Scheide. “He comes to work everyday excited to be doing what he loves. Walking around campus with him, the list of his five favorite trees quickly becomes ten and he greets each one with a pat on the trunk.”
(01/17/13 5:44pm)
The garage sits on the edge of the fields to the west of campus along Rte. 125. “Henry” the tractor is parked inside. The years have only slightly tarnished the fire-truck red paint job on the 1950’s Ford 8N. It was the top selling tractor in North America in its day, the “tractor that replaced the horse.”
The tractor was originally repurposed to run on hydrogen gas fuel in the spring of 2008. It was the brain-child of Dick Catlin ’56, a businessman, and Mark Benz ’56, a former engineer with General Electric. They worked with four students over the course of the 2008 spring semester to develop a tractor engine to run on gaseous rather than liquid fuel. Associate Professor of Physics Noah Graham was on board as an advisor.
“I act as a sounding board,” Graham said. “Each week the team would present to me, and I’d give them feedback, try to find holes in their proposals, help them clarify their ideas.”
Last year, after a four year hiatus from the project, a Winter Term class took the 2008 product – an engine that would turn over with hydrogen fuel and run roughly on propane gas – and further refined it with the assistance of mechanics at Champlain Valley Equipment in Middlebury. But one of the major problems with hydrogen is storage and accessibility. The initial thinking was that farmers could generate their own hydrogen fuel using a windmill to generate the energy necessary to split water. They would then use the hydrogen fuel to power their tractors. But a large tank of hydrogen would only run the tractor for about 20 minutes. So this year’s team has begun to explore an alternative fuel: methane.
Henry Philip ’13, a Physics major who has been working on the project for the past year and heads up the student team, explains that “the drive to use methane over hydrogen is mostly practical. How could a farmer get the fuel? They could make hydrogen. But they already have access to methane. What we’re trying to do is create a tractor where the farmer has complete control over the fuel supply and its price.”
Numerous dairy farmers around Addison County already use manure digesters to convert cow manure into fertilizer. A product of this process is methane gas. Some farmers burn the methane to generate electricity that they pump back into the grid. But could it be used as a viable fuel for farm vehicles, instead?
That’s what Benz, Catlin, Philip and seven other students are working to determine this Winter Term in INTD 1138: Methane as an Alternative Fuel for Agricultural and Transportation Applications. The challenges are two-fold. First, they are struggling with the fuel delivery system. According to Philip, each fuel injector (of which there are two) delivers fuel to two cylinders in the four-cylinder engine. Ensuring equal fuel levels in each cylinder has proved to be a headache. The timing is also difficult. The team is working to optimize engine performance by finding the right balance of methane fuel and air. A huge component of that is determining how much time each fuel injector should be open, letting methane into the cylinder.
The other problem with methane fuel is storage. The sizable tank currently strapped to the back of the tractor could run the tractor for an hour, estimates Philip. But ideally, the tractor could run for much longer on a single tank.
“It’s borderline practical to compress the methane and run [the tractor] off of compressed methane,” he said. “There’s some potential in liquid storage, but an issue is the amount of energy it takes to pressurize methane to keep it in liquid form. Another potential alternative is storing it on metal hydride — storing the gas molecules on a metal that are released when heated. The Department of Energy has gotten the concept to work with hydrogen. But not yet with methane.”
So for now, compression seems to be the best bet.
But the potential benefits — both economic and environmental — of a methane-burning tractor are well worth the effort of trying to solve these problems. If dairy farmers could use methane extracted from their own cow’s manure, they would cut fuel costs and have complete control over their fuel supply; an attractive option. Furthermore, the EPA estimates that the global warming potential (GWP) of methane is over twenty times greater than that of CO2 when not burnt as a fuel. And on the flip side, methane produces less CO2 when combusted than conventional diesel or gasoline fuels. By burning the methane, the farmers directly reduce their atmospheric impact on multiple levels.
The class of eight — first years and seniors, English and Physics majors — spent the first week of this winter term intimately acquainting themselves with the inner workings of the tractor. They are dedicating this week to examining the practicality of methane and natural gas as a fuel source. Next week, they’ll spend time on farms around Addison Country asking the question: how can this be feasible for local farmers?
“We’re trying to improve the economics and sustainability of farming. What’s great about the methane is that it brings [the fuel supply] back to Addison County, back to Middlebury,” said Philip.
By the end of Winter Term, the class hopes to have determined whether it is feasible for dairy farmers to fuel their tractors with methane produced from manure. In the future the Green Engineers, a student group on campus, hopes to continue to refine this process with the hope of helping develop methods for farmers in Addison County to become more environmentally and economically sustainable.