Meeting of Minds--Scientists and Science Teachers : For Some, Leap From Classroom to Edge of Biological Research Proves Uncomfortable
On the outside, it was a big city hotel. But inside was a strange world where insects had four or eight legs instead of six, plants sprouted minute flowers from every cell and men lived in the future.
That’s the way many of 34 Los Angeles area teachers seemed to feel when they attended an international scientific conference here, making a mind-boggling quantum leap from the familiar territory of high school science to the frontiers of biological research.
At the 10th Congress of the International Society of Developmental Biologists the teachers were surrounded by about 2,000 professional biologists--including Nobel prize winners and other internationally renowned specialists--from more than 100 countries in what amounted to a spectacular--and uncomfortable--role reversal. Like students on the first day of school, many were awed, intimidated or made slightly rebellious by the environmental and informational overload.
“The thing that jumped out at me yesterday was that I actually heard the name of a familiar organism,” said Gerald Garner, humorously echoing the sentiments of many in the group last week.
A science specialist with the Los Angeles Unified School District, Garner made the comment at a specially scheduled meeting of the teachers. The session was called after the group’s sponsor--the Los Angeles Educational Partnership--detected vibrations of discontent over the rarefied, sometimes incomprehensible, talks by scientists who are probing the complex secrets of how animals and plants develop.
At its clearest, the biologists’ central problem was expressed this way by Rockefeller University’s 1972 Nobel Prize winner Gerald M. Edelman: “How does the one-dimensional genetic code specify a three-dimensional animal?”
More frequently, however, the broad overview was lost to the non-specialists in a thicket of lectures on such topics as “Dynamics of a System Specifying Pattern in the Egg and Embryo of Xenopus (an African frog),” presented in a scientific shorthand sounding like a foreign language. And most of the lectures were delivered in dark rooms against a backdrop of slides of cells, drawings of embryos and chemical and genetic charts. Depictions of entire plants or animals, such as a mutated fruit fly with the wrong number of legs, appeared only occasionally in the dimness.
During the meeting, Diana Ortloff, a science teacher at El Sereno Junior High School, jokingly expressed her difficulties in hobnobbing with august biologists. “I had one tell me, ‘I don’t want to be condescending.’ I said, ‘Please be.’ ” She paused and looked around the room. “You know what works? Find someone who doesn’t speak English well.” When the laughter died down, she added, “I’m serious, they explain it in English.”
Like several other teachers whose specialties are in sciences other than biology, Ortloff said she felt doubly in the dark. “I’m an earth science person. . . . It’s hard for me with biology,” she said. “You know, I can do biology and stuff like that but I’m more comfortable with rocks and dead bones. If it crawls and it’s slimy, I don’t like it.”
Another source of discomfort was the fear that classroom experiments inspired by the conference could cross over into controversy. When a teacher spoke enthusiastically about a “way to precipitate DNA (the basic material of chromosomes that contains the genetic code and transmits the hereditary pattern) cheaply, which sounds like a terribly exciting thing for me to do in the classroom,” Franklin High School physics teacher John Shaffren interjected his misgivings.
“Are you sure that the high school administration would be willing to allow” a class to conduct what have become routine biology lab procedures, he asked. “There’s always the worry that something’s going to go astray and somebody’s going to do something wrong.” Raising his voice over murmurs of disagreement, he added, “Well, there is. I just wonder if you got something like that, if it’s not going to cause trouble.”
Later Shaffren told a reporter that he is concerned that some forms of genetic research are spawning “a technology for manipulation” of living organisms. “We should all be afraid of what these guys (the scientists at the conference) are doing. Sooner or later we’re going to have to deal with something coming out of the laboratory,” he declared.
Harold Slavkin, chief of USC’s developmental biology lab and chair of the conference, told the teachers that it was too early to worry about the social consequences of projects developed as a result of the conference. It was more important, he said, to use the conference as an intellectual stimulus for themselves.
“You’ve discovered a problem called isolation and precipitation of DNA as an exercise,” Slavkin said. “So one of the things, before you get into the bureaucratic do’s and don’ts, might be to try it. Let’s fool with it a little bit. This room is filled with authorities who know how to make things safe for the schools. But before we get to the final transfer to the world, let’s use our heads, let’s play with some of these ideas.”
Gerald Garner supported Slavkin, arguing that teachers could use the conference as a way to bring up-to-date knowledge into the classroom. Many important discoveries take years to work their way into textbooks, he explained. “Wouldn’t it be refreshing, wouldn’t it be wonderful if in a year or maybe less that something that has to do with the cutting edge of science could be fairly widely disseminated in the school system?” he said.
Despite the misgivings, it was clear when the meeting broke up that most of the dissatisfaction had been defused. The teachers dispersed in generally good humor and a few of them were spotted the next day stopping scientists in hallways to ask for fuller explanations of their compressed lectures.
For instance, Locke High School biology and chemistry teacher John Guldseth was pleased to note that scientists can bicker too. “Some of these scientists say some of the research (presented at the conference) is sloppy and the conclusions are unwarranted,” he said. “But you talk to someone else and they say it’s OK.”
Thomas Cline, a Princeton University researcher who addressed the conference on his study of early genetic events that determine sex in fruit flies, said that even biologists could have a tough time at the conference.
“To convey what we’re doing in a 30-minute time period here isn’t easy,” Cline said. “We have to use a special terminology and one word may convey a very complicated concept. To people who aren’t immersed in that kind of thing it’s hard to follow. And my field is a very large one. Research on fruit flies began in 1905, so there have been people spending their whole lives on fruit flies for 80 years now.”
Cline said he had been impressed by the teachers’ questions, adding, “I guess what encourages me is seeing such competent people from the public schools. We’re at a point now where it takes five or six years of undergraduate work to get into (scientific) graduate programs. So it’s good to see these teachers here, I’m really glad to see it.”
It may be noted, too, that the Los Angeles Educational Partnership offered an enticement to the teachers--a week on Catalina at a USC research lab. They’re there this week, thrashing and hashing out what they learned at the conference. This is the second year the partnership has sponsored math/science fellowships for Los Angeles area teachers, who are picked for the program from a pool of applicants. The nonprofit partnership develops and funds projects to help teachers enhance their classroom teaching. It is supported by local corporations and foundations. One of the goals of the math/science fellowships is for teachers to develop workshops that pass on ideas inspired by experiences such as the biology conference.
Some of that inspiration seemed to be already at work last week. Outside the conference’s main hall, Herbert Henry, a chemistry teacher at Bell High School, recalled enthusiastically that “I was talking to a guy this morning about protozoans. He was giving us tips about how we can raise our own protozoans.”
