Recap of SciChat #1, February 11th, Abby Buchwalter

The first SciChat was a blast! We had a full house of students (27 in total) and they had many more questions than I could get to. According to our informants in the classroom, the students were very enthusiastic about coming back again for future SciChats.

I decided to give the students a prepared 15 minute presentation rather than doing any on-camera demonstrations. I think this worked pretty well. My attempt at recording audio and video of the SciChat failed (more on that later), but I re-recorded a close facsimile of my presentation, which you can see below.

After my presentation, students came up to the camera one by one to ask questions. This worked very well! The interaction felt personal and friendly this way, and it seemed that the students felt at ease asking questions. [We didn’t record the Q & A because we would need signed releases in order to have the students on camera.]

Things I noticed:

It’s very counter intuitive to look at the camera when talking on video chat. I spent a lot of time looking at the little bubble in the bottom right corner while talking to the students. Nancy had to remind me to look at the camera while answering questions after my talk. This may seem like a minor point but you are going to be on a projector, so if you are looking at the classroom instead of down into a corner of your screen, the students will feel that they are engaging with you a lot more.

While giving my talk went smoothly overall- the Skype interface was flawless and embedded videos worked very well- it was a bit of an odd experience giving a talk to a room full of people that you can’t see very well. It’s hard to gauge how your presentation is being received via webcam. It really pays here to have a clear idea of what you want to say…. I realized while talking just how much I usually rely on my read of my audience to go on to explain something in more depth vs. keep trucking along to the next thing.

Thanks to Dona Mapston who was in the classroom, we have a transcript of the Q & A session- see below. Dona and Nancy pointed out that my answers were rather long and involved. This is such an ingrained tendency as a scientist- I got much too methodological at times. For future SciChats, it will be better to keep answers shorter and more to the point so that more students get to ask questions. We only got to about half of the students’ questions before our time ran out! A key to success here is to prompt yourself to think about why a 10-12 year old might be asking a question and answer accordingly. Many times, the students want a simple explanation of HOW something works, rather than a more detailed explanation of WHY something works a particular way. This seems difficult, but it is such a valuable experience for a scientist to have! We bench scientists don’t spend much time thinking about our audience when we explain something, and we can become much better communicators if we become more adept at meeting the needs of our audience.

Student: It’s cool how the colors show up in the cell!  How does it look when you don’t dye it?

Abby:

I made a video of the images I took on the microscope so you could see the different parts as it rotates around like that.  The reason that it’s colored like that is because I used different dyes so I could see different parts of the nucleus.  I don’t have any [non-dyed] images that I can show you right now, but there’s a different kind of a microscope called a phase contrast microscope that will show you the parts of the cell that light moves through more easily, those parts will look clear, and then there will be parts of the cell that prevent light going through it, kind of like a thin piece of white paper you can see light through it but something that’s really dense and heavy you can’t see very much light through it, like a black curtain or something.  So if you were to look at a cell with that kind of light, you would see the DNA for example would look really dark because it prevents the light moving through it and there are also other structures in the cell that would look that way when you look with that kind of light.

Teacher: Kind of like on a black and white television?

Yes.

Student: When did you decide you wanted to be a scientist?

Abby:

That’s a good question – I forgot to talk about that in my presentation so I’m glad you asked.  I think I realized I liked science a lot earlier than I decided to be a scientist.  When I was very young I was very curious about how things worked and how they were put together and I would spend a lot of time tinkering around with things, either cool plants and animals I would find in my backyard or I remember one time I took an old telephone that belonged to my babysitter (and she was ok with me doing this) but one summer afternoon my bother and I took it apart and looked at all of these tiny little pieces in this old telephone and of course we had no idea how to put it back together but I remember being fascinated how all these time little parts came together to make a functioning machine.  And then later on, in high school, I realized that I was really liking my science classes, and when I went to college I had originally thought I wanted to be a doctor but I realized as I spent more time in science classes the thing I was most excited about was solving puzzles and doctors do that too, but as a scientist you get decide a lot more what kinds of questions you want to ask and why and when you’re a doctor you have to focus more on fixing things and helping people, which is also very important, but when you’re in a lab you have a lot of freedom to decide what you want to do.

Student: How do you get the dye into the nucleus?

Abby:

That’s a good question! Ok, so the cell has a lot of membranes that surround it and keep it separate from the rest of the world and those membranes do prevent a lot of things from getting into it but some things that are really small and have the right chemical characteristics can get in anyway. So that dye that was staining the DNA is just so small and has the right kind of chemical charge that it can get through those membranes and all the way into the nucleus and once it gets there it can bind to the DNA double helix really well so it just concentrates there and gets stuck. So all I have to do is take a dish of those cells and take some of that dye and pipette it onto the cells and let it sit for like an hour and then it’s concentrated in the nucleus.

Student: Have you ever found something in a cell that was abnormal?

Abby:

Hmmm, that’s kind of what I look for all the time. So a lot of the time what I’m doing is tinkering with something in the cell to make it not work like it usually does and then seeing what happens. So if I find that something isn’t behaving like it usually does, that means that the thing I messed up was really important. Like if I take away something that the cell really needs, I can tell that the cell really needed it because now the cell isn’t functioning properly or growing properly. So I make cells function abnormally a lot. There have also been a couple of times where I have just been looking at where particular parts of a cell function or how they act with each other and I’ve noticed some really cool things. When I was in graduate school a couple of years ago before I came to the Salk, I was studying an enzyme and I was very surprised to see that under certain conditions this enzyme would move from one part of the cell to another and this appeared to be very important for its function and nobody had ever seen that before.  So that was pretty cool and I saw that also under a microscope.

Student: Can you see the pores of the nucleus in a microscope that can look at living cells?

Abby:

A lot of times what you have to do is stain the cell with some sort of dye or an antibody which is a special kind of molecule which will recognize certain kinds of proteins and to do that you usually have to kill the cell.  So there’s a balance between what you can see when the cell is alive and what you can only see when you fix the cells and prevent them from growing.  There are other tricks we can use by changing proteins inside the cell to make them fluorescent so what that means is that we hit them with laser light and all of the sudden they emit bright green light or bright red light and we do that a lot.  So in that last image I showed you, that bright green signal was a fluorescent protein. So when we do that we can look at it inside of a living cell and I do that a lot. That way I can see nuclear pore proteins, those gates.  But you can’t just see those structures by looking with normal light, you have to have some way to see them specifically and not all the other stuff around it.

Student: Do you have to store the cells at a certain temperature in the pink liquid?

Abby:

Yes, we do.  So the conditions that we grow the cells in within the incubator are just like the physiological temperature of our body. So you probably learned in biology class that inside of our bodies we’re about 37* celcius and that’s the temperature that those incubators are at, so that’s about 98* farenheit.  They also have to have a certain amount of oxygen, and a certain amount of carbon dioxide, to keep the cells happy.

Student: What kinds of cells do you look at?

Abby:

That’s a good question.  So we look at a lot of different kinds of cells. Most of the cells that I work with are sort of model cells, and I call them that because they don’t look like a particular part of an organism anymore, like they don’t act like a part of the brain, or part of the muscle or of the skin.  Because they’ve been in culture for a long time, they sort of live that way, in culture, in a dish. But the cells that I work with the most are from mouse muscle.  They’re not really muscles anymore, because they’re just growing in a dish, and they don’t look like muscle or contract like muscle or anything like that, but that’s where they originally came from.  And other people in the lab use cells that came from cancers, from people or from animals. Sometimes people will donate brain cells too, lots of different sources.

Student: What are you trying to accomplish by doing all your work?

Abby:

That’s a very good question.  There are a couple of different ways to answer it.  I can tell you what the overarching goal of myself and all the people I work with is, and that would be to understand human biology better, to understand how our bodies work so we can understand how to treat human disease better.  But the work that I do everyday is pretty far removed from that.  It will take a long time for the questions I’m asking now to be applied to fixing a disease later. But we’re laying the foundations now for work that people could do later that would be moving more directly trying curing a disease.  Because we’re just asking very basic question, like how does the nucleus work, why do these proteins go here and not here.  But we think it’s really important because sometimes those proteins are mutated in disease like in cancer or change in function as an organism gets older, so we think it’s important to study them because they seem to very important for normal cell growth and for normal health.  But the thing that motivates me everyday is curiosity, so I think it’s a lot of fun to solve puzzles and I think it’s really cool to see something that nobody else has seen before, and that’s something we’re often lucky to do as scientists so I really enjoy that.

Student: How do you get the cells?

Abby:

So there are a couple of different ways we can get the cells. You can do something as easy as a swabbing inside of your cheek, if you were to do that you would find growing cells, some would be dead but some would be alive and you could maybe grow those.  One way that a lot of cell lines we use in the lab are made is by taking cells from cancer patients. So when a doctor takes a cancer out of a patient, there are often a lot of cells that can grow really quickly that can be used to study in the lab.  It’s important to study those cells because they cause cancer and because they work really well in a lab.  We also have some cells that we take from animals, after an animal has died, from different tissues in that animal depending on what we want to study, so from their brain or from their skin or their muscle.