On the last night of the course, the fellows settled in with popcorn and watched the movies they had made (with huge assistance from Brad Shuster) of sea urchin fertilization and development:
Sperm darts around sea urchin eggs and fertilizes them. Once a single sperm has penetrated an egg, a “fertilization envelope” forms around the egg that acts as a barrier to the entry of other sperm. Credit: 2009 MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellows
A single-celled sea urchin embryo pinches off and divides into two daughter cells. Credit: 2009 MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellows
A sea urchin larva, or pluteus. The moving muscle is the animal’s developing gut. Credit: 2009 MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellows
The Biomedical Fellows in the 2009 MBL Logan Science Journalism Program have left Woods Hole, and are back to work capturing science news around the country. Luckily, the fellows took some great photos, so they’ll never forget the beauty of the MBL’s environment, the fascinating marine animals they were introduced to, and the day-and-night hours spent in the lab. Here are a few shots from their fellowship:
In the lab, Dr. David Burgess of Boston College helped the fellows stain and prepare sea urchin immune cells for imaging under the microscope:
From left: Christine Junge, David Burgess, and Julia Kumari Drapkin (Photo by Juliana Tiraboschi)
Sea urchin embryos in the late prism phase, caught on film through the lens of a fluorescent microscope. The fellows stained the embryos with antibodies for tubulin (green), cadherin (red) and DNA (blue):
(Photo by the MBL Logan Science Journalism Program)
MBL Ecosystems Center scientist Chris Neill took the fellows to Martha’s Vineyard, but they didn’t just relax on the beach. They explored the Vineyard’s coastal plains, where Neill and the Nature Conservancy are using controlled burns and clearing to restore these disturbance-dependent grasslands. Here’s the group:
From left: Massimo Roncati, Nick Zagorski, Kimani Chege, Chris Neill, Lea Alford, Juliana Tiraboschi, Andrea Early, Christine Junge, Julia Kumari Drapkin (Photo by Juliana Tiraboschi)
The underbelly of a shy skate. The fellows helped Captain Ed Enos collect a trove of sea creatures on their trip aboard the RV Gemma:
(Photo by Juliana Tiraboschi)
A final view of the MBL from the Swope Center across Eel Pond. Farewell fellows!
The Logan Science Journalism Program ended this morning and the fellows are now on their way back to life beyond pipetting, microscopes, and asking question after question about cells and cell division, proteins and DNA. For the past nine days they have spent most of their waking hours in the MBL’s Loeb Laboratory, living and breathing science. Many of these days they stayed until midnight – making movies and micrographs, setting up various experiments, and learning why scientists are so passionate about studying basic biological processes. This is one of the main goals of this program.
We will miss you, fellows. But we hope you will remember your MBL days with fondness and a fuller understanding of how science and scientists work.
Much of the fun of cell biology is making movies of cells in action, though it often requires some fiddling around with the microscope and the camera. Here, Julia Kumari Drapkin lends her expertise in photojournalism to David Burgess, as they set up the computer to film a dividing sea urchin embryo. Stay tuned — we will be posting some of the movies we made!
You see that firelane? You’re looking at one of the most biodiverse spots in Massachusetts. Yes, that mowed strip of grass between the trees.
A firelane's worth of biodiversity on Martha's Vineyard
The coastal sandplains and grasslands found on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket support an incredible range of plants, birds, moths, and butterflies-many endangered. They’re globally rare ecosystems, but not because of the usual litany of environmental abuses. These iconic landscapes result from occasional human disturbances to the natural oak forest succession. So the fields actually require a bit of abuse to conserve.
Burning and clearing fields was once common on Martha’s Vineyard. The practice started with the indigenous people who first settled here and ended with the decline of agriculture in the late 19th century. But residents on Martha’s Vineyard today mostly leave the land alone. So instead of open fields, mature oak forests now dominate the island. And those forests don’t support the same degree of biodiversity.
So MBL researcher Chris Neil and the Nature Conservancy actually want to disturb the environment here. A little bit. In order to bring native sandplains and grasslands back to Martha’s Vineyard, they’re experimenting with prescribed burning, land clearing, and mowing as well as different soils and seeds.
It’s not your average save the trees campaign, but apparently the residents of Martha’s Vineyard don’t mind setting the island on fire. Occasionally. – Julia Kumari Drapkin
There is always a way that scientists and journalists find a common ground. In the MBL Science Journalism Program, this common ground could be history. I did not expect that time would be dedicated to learning about the road science has moved on to be where it is today, particularly the history of molecular biology.
David Burgess and Brad Shuster spent much of the morning session Monday explaining the history of the Human Genome Project and the possible Nobel Prize candidates for mapping the genome, from James Watson to Francis Collins to Craig Venter. The fellows learned about the history.
I went digging on the Internet and I found something interesting — a news programme done by PBS NOVA called “Cracking the Code of Life.” It confirmed the whole politics and intrigues of mapping the human genome. It even tells where the future of genomics is going. Very interesting.
I share the link below and I promise you are going to like the video/ videos.
Over lunch, I had a conversation with Brad Shuster about a Japanese scientist, Katsuma Dan, who wanted to preserve his work during World War II. Dan is today considered a pioneer of the use of sea urchin embryos to study cell division. Near the end of the war, Dan left a note in his marine lab in Japan asking the Allied forces to destroy the weapons and the war instruments but preserve the scientific equipment, so that when the military was done they could return to their scientific home. This note is saved in the MBL Library.
Thanks to him, the fellows can now understand basic cell biology by studying sea urchin fertilization and development.
I’ve found myself asking many series of “why”s, like a two-year-old. One of the scientists will say, “and the actin will make the cell move” and one of us journalists will ask, “Why?” Then the scientist will explain, and again, we’ll ask, but why does that happen? And so on and so forth. Luckily for us, the scientists are very patient with our toddler-esque questions.
Juliana Tiraboschi and Massimo Roncati pipetting sperm off of a sea urchin
So many things have surprised me about working at an MBL lab, most especially how fun and laid back it is. One moment I am sitting with my brow scrunched, trying to understand how antibodies help isolate proteins, and then the next moment we’re making jokes about sea urchins. (Oh how I love these adorable creatures! I want to get some as pets when I get home…)
I was also surprised to find all of us fellows hanging out in the lab last night, on one of our “free” nights. On the first day, Andrea explained how hard all the scientists work, and what long hours they put in. And now I see why–it’s fun! It’s so neat to sit around with incredibly smart people who are working on really interesting projects. The lab is kind of like a big living room with lots of very expensive equipment in it. We all chat and listen to music while we do research on the computer, or extract eggs from those adorable sea urchins, or make gels of urchin sperm. So we all found ourselves converged there on Friday night after dinner.
One of the things I’m most excited about is conducting an experiment that we have designed, which will test what happens to urchin embryos in sea water at various PH levels. We’re choosing PH levels that may actually come to be in the next 90 years due to changes in the temperature of the water. It will be fascinating to be a part of an actual experiment that may tell us something about the impact of global warming on sea creatures.
Why wait? On their first day, the SJP fellows learned how to extract sperm and eggs from sea urchins, fertilize the eggs, and make a movie of the earliest cleavages (cell divisions). We were hooked in immediately by this basic and beautiful life process.
Kimani Chege and Julia Kumari Drapkin inject concentrated salt into a sea urchin to induce the release of its gametes
Brad Shuster shows a sea urchin shedding its eggs into a beaker to Kimani Chege, Nick Zagorski, and Julia Kumari Drapkin
In the video below, Kimani Chege drops the sperm into a dish containing eggs, and the fellows watch the fertilization occur.
spent much of the morning session Monday explaining the history of the Human Genome Project and the possible Nobel Prize candidates for mapping the genome, from James Watson to Francis Collins to Craig Venter. The fellows learned about the history.
