Science Posters Make Me Sweat

One hundred and two students representing 26 fields participated in Dartmouth's fourth annual science poster symposium in May. The posters summarized research projects conducted under the supervision of professors and mentors from all the College's science departments, the medical school and Thayer, and from the local Montshire Museum and V.A. center.

I would like to tell you all about the projects these posters summarized. I'm a former English major, but I know a thing or two about slime molds and the orbits of electrons. I thought it would be interesting and edifying to go to this exhibit and see what Dartmouth's young scientists are up to. Alas, I'm afraid I had trouble getting past the titles. They made me sweat.

How could I hope to make sense of, much less report on, projects the likes of senior Amanda MacMillan's "Mutational analysis of the RAT 7 nucleooporin in S. cerevisiae (I found out, at least, that S. cerevisiae is baker's yeast.) MacMillan's poster won first place in the Christopher Reed Science Competition, for which all senior honors projects were eligible.

Senior Kristin Cobb tied for second place with her project, "The site-directed mutagenesis of the ACAT enzyme." (She also got herself named valedictorian.) Cobb's abstract contained the words "firefly luciferase so I ventured a guess that the research had to do with the glowing mechanism of fireflies. "It didn't have anything to do with firefly luminescense" she told me. Well.

Then there was this poster by E.E. Just intern Martin Price '96: "Solidphase extraction procedure and high-performance liquid chromatographic assay of risperidone and 9-hydroxyrisperidone. " And that was in psychiatry. This is hopeless, I thought. So I asked Douglas Hoffman, associate professor of psychiatry and pharmacology, what it was that his advisee Martin Price had studied. Hoffman explained that many drugs used in psychiatric disorders have a relatively narrow window of dosage - you need to maintain an adequate level of the drag, but avoid a level that will cause blood toxicity and side effects that may themselves be interpreted as psychiatric disorders. Price worked on developing a reliable and sensitive method for quantifying levels of a new anti-psychotic drug called risperidone in the blood of patients. This was no lab course - the professor didn't have the answers already.

Taking on undergraduate interns is not a timesaver for a researcher, though. Advising them is a huge investment of hours spent in supervision and tutoring in research methods. Dartmouth students are bright and do quality work, but "tend to be innocent of lab experience," Hoffman says—which is what the internships are all about. He and his colleagues sponsor undergraduate research simply because they are teachers. "Science is a hands-on experience," he explains. "The best way to learn it is to apprentice."

Even first-year Women in Science Project interns get to do big-league sounding stuff. Amanda Glenn and Cynthia Vodopivec for example, studied intracranial pressure under engineering Professor Stuart Trembly at the Thayer School. (Yes, engineering.)

Maybe if WISP had been around when I was a wee u-grad, or maybe if some mentor type had seen in my eyes the promise of a great scientist, I'd have done a poster too.