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What happens when graduate students in biology are given the freedom to play, dabble in new fields, launch into the unknowns of genuine research, not worry about getting “good” results?

In the case of the MBL Physiology course, one outcome has been—paradoxically—an extraordinary level of new knowledge and publications generated by student-and-faculty teams.

In the Dec. 21 issue of Science magazine, several scientists who have directed the Physiology course detail their winning formula for instilling in students the passion for and ability to conduct “real research,” as lead author Ron Vale of University of California, San Francisco, describes it.

The article presents the overwhelmingly positive feedback from a poll of Physiology course alumni from 2004 to 2010; and the remarkable list of 23 research papers and 59 meeting abstracts that developed out of Physiology course projects from 2005 to 2012.

Physiology course students, faculty, and family members with a sand sculpture they made of the mitotic spindle. Photo courtesy of Ron Vale.

Vale and Tim Mitchison of Harvard Medical School co-directed the Physiology course from 2004 to 2009 and revamped it in significant ways: (1) an equal number of students from cell biology and from physical sciences are admitted (2) students go through a “boot camp” to learn research techniques outside their fields and to begin thinking and stretching beyond their comfort zones (3) faculty give students the kernel of a “real” research problem – not an exercise – and the students develop an experimental plan, reporting back on what they found at the end of 11 intense days (often working 14 hours a day!)

And if they find nothing? Not a problem! “That’s most of what is going on!” Vale says. “Learning from failure is a crucial part of being a scientist.” The atmosphere the course intentionally creates is “intense, yet low-risk,” minimizing “the fear of failure or of appearing ignorant, factors that impede students, as well as senior scientists, from venturing into new fields or learning new approaches,” the article states.

Very often, students and faculty become so inspired by a research problem that they continue to work on it after the course ends, at their home institutions. That is how the seven-week Physiology course has generated so many publications.

The positive impact on students is evident from the alumni poll, which includes comments like, “I am now much more likely to try new experiments even though they seem nearly impossible. This attitude has had a very positive influence on the fun I have being a scientist, which is also reflected in the results.”

“People have a tremendous amount of fun in the Physiology course, whether their project gets a good result or not,” Vale says. “They appreciate the experience of going after a real research problem, of being surrounded by faculty and fellow students who are excited by the thrill of the chase … We are trying to learn something new, and we don’t necessarily know how to get there. That is science!”

The current co-directors of the Physiology course, Dyche Mullins of University of California, San Francisco, and Clare Waterman of the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, have preserved the basic structure and spirit that Vale and Mitchison brought to the course.

Physiology is one of 22 courses the MBL offers for advanced, laboratory-based research training in fields such as cellular physiology, embryology, neurobiology, and microbiology.

Citation:

Vale RD, DeRisi J, Phillips R, Mullins RD, Waterman C, and Mitchison TJ (2012) Interdisciplinary Graduate Training in Teaching Labs. Science 338: 1542-1543.

The greeting may be small, but the wishes it sends are big!

Without magnification, this image is not visible to the naked eye. At 50 microns square, it is about half the diameter of a human hair. It was produced by MBL research assistant Blair Rossetti, who laser-engraved the tree outline and text into a thin, polymer membrane using a laser microdissection microscope in the MBL’s Central Microscopy Facility. The microscope (the Zeiss PALM CombiSystem) is typically used to extract microscopic regions of tissue samples for further analysis, or for small-scale manipulations of micron-sized objects.

Joan V. Ruderman, Ph.D., has been named President and Director of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), an independent, nonprofit center for international research and education in biology, biomedicine, and environmental science. Ruderman is the first woman to become Director of the MBL, which next year celebrates the 125th anniversary of its founding.

Ruderman, who has served on the MBL Board of Trustees since 1986, is currently the Marion V. Nelson Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School. She succeeds Gary Borisy, Ph.D., who is retiring as MBL President and Director.

Ruderman has been closely affiliated with the MBL for nearly four decades. Her long tenure on the Board of Trustees includes membership on its Executive Committee since 2008, when she was named Speaker of the MBL Corporation. She was a student in the MBL’s world-famous Embryology course in 1974, and returned to teach and serve as co-director of that course in subsequent years. She also conducted research at the MBL for more than 20 summers, including groundbreaking studies on the mechanisms that regulate cell division.

Read the full article on the MBL website.

What could a device like the Amazon Kindle possibly have in common with a cuttlefish?

Both depend on reflective surfaces to vividly communicate information.  For tablets and other e-devices, synthetic reflective e-paper is used to deliver the best available display technology for users.  For cuttlefish and their relatives, squid and octopus, (all of which belong to class of animals called cephalopods), their remarkable skin provides natural reflectivity with very efficient manipulation of available light. This enables their adaptive coloration for communication or camouflage with a speed and diversity unparalleled in the animal kingdom.

Credit: Lisa Ventre, University of Cincinnati

A new paper from MBL biologists Lydia Mäthger and Roger Hanlon and material scientists from the University of Cincinnati, the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Army Research Laboratory examines the parallels between e-Paper technology (the technology behind sunlight-readable devices like the Kindle) and the mechanisms of adaptive coloration in cephalopods.

The researchers note that while the basic approach for color change is similar in techie devices and in nature, humanity has never developed anything as complex or sophisticated as the biology and physics of cephalopod skin.

With their collaboration, the scientists propose three hopeful outcomes for the interdisciplinary community: that reflective display engineers may gain new insights from millions of years of natural selection and evolution; that biologists will benefit from understanding the types of mechanisms, characterization, and metrics used in synthetic reflective e-Paper; and that all scientists will gain a clearer picture of the long-term prospects for capabilities such as adaptive concealment and signaling.

Dancing Woods Hole squid skin became an Internet sensation this week in the form of “Insane in the Chromatophores,” a bass-thumping music video by Greg Gage of Backyard Brains, who made it while visiting the MBL to lecture in two summer neuroscience courses.

In its first week online (8/23-30), “Insane” racked up more than 1.3 million hits and reached #1 on YouTube’s “most popular videos” chart, and was picked up by nearly 100 media outlets and blogs, from Time Magazine to MSN to Discovery Magazine.

Using hip-hop music pumped out of his iPod, Gage sent electrical current into the squid’s fin, which caused its nerve cells to fire and the skin’s shimmery red, brown, and yellow pigment organs to muscularly expand and contract in rhythm with the song’s booming bass.

He then recorded the dancing chromatophores using an 8x microscope and posted the video on the Internet, which responded with, “Wow!”

The unexpected hit came about like many an MBL collaboration: serendipitously. Gage, whose Background Brains is devoted to bringing neuroscience to children and the masses, had previously done a similar experiment with an iPod and a cockroach, which he performed for a TED audience. What would happen if he pumped the iPod’s current into squid skin, Gage wondered? While in the MBL’s Marine Resources Center attempting to capture a squid from a tank (not an easy thing to do), MBL squid expert Roger Hanlon happened to walk in the room, saw Gage struggling, and offered to help. The two started talking, and Hanlon introduced Gage to a post-doc in his lab, Paloma Gonzalez-Bellido. She had just the squid-skin prep Gage needed, as she and fellow post-docs Trevor Wardill and Robyn Crook had developed it for a study of squid skin iridescence (published by the Royal Society on August 15).

“Insane in the Chromatophores” gave a huge – and colorful — boost to the visibility of this Hanlon lab research. Another spin-off is a new, ongoing collaboration between one of the MBL Methods in Computational Neuroscience class students, Emily Machevicius of MIT, and the Hanlon lab, using similar videos of electrophysiologically stimulated skin preps. “We might consider this the first ‘summer course/resident research lab’ interaction this summer under the aegis of the Program in Sensory Physiology and Behavior,” Hanlon says. “Thanks to Greg Gage for making it happen!” (Gage is an alumnus of the MBL’s Neural Systems and Behavior (2010) and Neuroinfomatics (2005) courses).

(Note on the music video: This song, like many hip-hop songs, contains explicit language. Parental guidance suggested. “Hip-hop was required as classical music lacks the bass,” Gage noted.)

Nerves in red can be easily traced among the distinctive chromatophores and iridophores that they innervate. Credit: Wardill, Gonzalez-Bellido, Crook & Hanlon, Proc Royal Soc B