Celebrating Black in STEM

I have been very fortunate to know and work with outstanding Black scientists throughout my career.  Here are a few of them.

I met Joe Graves when we were undergraduates at Oberlin College.  We took an evolution course together.  I remember discussing with Joe our mutual fascination with evolution and wondering how we might go about studying it.  I met up again with Joe at UC-Irvine, where we were both conducting evolution experiments—Joe using fruit flies, and me with bacteria.  Joe and I reconnected once more when he and I became founding members of the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action.  Joe now studies bacterial evolution, and we are becoming scientific collaborators as well.

JoAnn White was an ecologist at UNC, studying the life-history and population dynamics of periodical cicadas.  She served on my doctoral advisory committee and was a highly successful faculty member.  Unfortunately, she left academia, even though she had tenure, because it was too frustrating. I was honored that she asked me to write a reference letter when she moved to a new profession.  But it was a terrible loss for academia to lose such an outstanding scientist and role model as JoAnn White.

Paul Turner was one of my first graduate students.  He joined my lab in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at UC-Irvine, and he moved with me to MSU, receiving his Ph.D. in 1995.  Paul has impressed me in many ways, not only as a superb scientist and mentor, but also in his upbeat outlook on life.  Somehow he manages to smile and laugh about the challenges of being a departmental chair and interim dean, even while running a lab that conducts ground-breaking research.

Lynette Ekunwe was my lab manager and technician for seven years after I moved to MSU. She helped to sustain the long-term evolution experiment with E. coli after its move from UC-Irvine, and she helped run my lab group as it grew in size. Lynette moved to Jackson State University when her husband, the late Steve Ekunwe, took a faculty position there. After the move, Lynette earned a doctorate in public health, and she now works in the field of epidemiology.

I first met Scott Edwards when he was a graduate student at UC-Berkeley. I suspected that he was a rising star, and I was right.  Although Scott and I have not collaborated on actual science, we’ve worked together in other ways.  Scott and I served successive terms as Presidents of the Society for the Study of Evolution, and he has been a valued member of the External Advisory Board for the BEACON Center.

Shenandoah Oden was an undergraduate from Detroit when she joined my lab in the 1990s.  She worked with postdoc Santiago Elena on measuring the fitness effects of random insertion mutations in E. coli, leading to a paper in Genetica. What I remember best about Shenandoah is a question she asked me right after Brendan Bohannan presented his dissertation seminar: “How do scientists come up with the questions they ask?” I told her that was the best question that any student had ever asked me.  It reminded me of how Joe Graves and I, when we were undergrads, wondered how we might study evolution. To Shenandoah, I explained the importance of personal curiosity and mentors in finding questions that are both interesting and answerable.

Marwa Adewa, Maia Rowles and Kiyana Weatherspoon were three excellent undergraduate researchers in my lab, all of whom were mentored by Zachary Blount. Maia and Kiyana were coauthors on a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, London B, which reported the results of what we call the “all-hands project”—one in which a generation of lab members performed a set of parallel assays to measure the subtle changes in fitness in late generations of the long-term evolution experiment with E. coli. Marwa now works in the field of veterinary medical research, while Maia and Kiyana are pursuing careers with a biomedical focus.

Judi Brown Clarke was, until very recently, the Diversity Director for our BEACON Center. In that role she generated and managed many successful programs that introduced hundreds of students at all levels to evolution and provided them with opportunities to engage in scientific research. She also was a great listener and valuable source of advice for many of us when we faced personal challenges and setbacks. An Olympic medalist, Judi recently became the Chief Diversity Officer at Stony Brook University.

I met Jay Bundy in 2013, at the Evolution meeting in Snowbird, Utah.  Who was this student who was asking so many thoughtful, insightful questions of the speakers?  I ran into Jay as we rushed between talks, introduced myself, and learned that he was a masters student at Penn State.  He wasn’t sure if he was interested in microbes, but I encouraged him to think about joining BEACON.  Jay came to MSU, first as a BEACON staff member contributing to education and outreach activities, and then as a graduate student in the Department of Integrative Biology.  He also contributed to the all-hands project.  However, he switched from studying bacteria to digital organisms, and he’s now performing and analyzing experiments to quantify how the duration of history in an evolving lineage’s previous environment influences its subsequent evolution in a new environment. Stay tuned for Jay’s findings—he’s working on a huge paper. Jay is as deeply thoughtful about science and life as I imagined when I first heard his questions at the Evolution meeting.

I also met Nkrumah Grant in 2013, when he visited MSU while exploring possible graduate programs.  He immediately impressed me with his personal story of overcoming obstacles.  Nkrumah explained to me his love of science as a child, and how he had gotten discouraged and derailed before undertaking a concerted effort to pursue his dream of science and scholarship.  And pursue it he did … and continues to do.  From a G.E.D. to a Ph.D.  Co-author on the all-hands project, co-first-author on a paper just published in eLife, and three more papers posted to bioRxiv in the last few weeks.  He also just defended his dissertation, giving a beautiful public seminar followed by an engaging, collegial exam.  Nkrumah has done all this and more while being a dedicated father and working tirelessly to promote equity and inclusion in science.

Last but not least, Ali Abdel Magid and Jalin Jordan are two of the current generation of superb undergraduate researchers in the lab. Ali is working with Nkrumah on the evolution of bacterial cell size, while Jalin works with Kyle Card on the evolution of antibiotic resistance.  Both Ali and Jalin are also working toward future careers in medicine. This summer, they are reading work that integrates evolution and medicine including the landmark book, Why We Get Sick, by Nesse and Williams, and the path-breaking paper by Tami Lieberman et al. on the evolution of bacteria in the lungs of CF patients.

My science is better, and my life richer, because of all these people, and many more.  How much better science would be, and how much richer all of our lives would be, if we would open more doors, listen more carefully, and live, learn, and work together.

***

After reading a draft of this essay, Nkrumah Grant, Joe Graves, and Jay Bundy all asked me to say more about this:  How can we achieve the aspirations expressed in my closing sentence above? 

I plan to reflect more on their vital question.  In the meantime, I invite readers who have ideas to put them in the comments below.

EDIT: I should also acknowledge two other influences: A high-school teacher, Mrs. Clayton, who taught a Black History class that I took, and who introduced me to Frederick Douglass, whose autobiography I read with awe and admiration.

A Birthday Sonnet

This past weekend, I celebrated my 60^th birthday with friends and family from all over. One of the roasters was Ben “The Bard” Kerr, a professor at the University of Washington and colleague in the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action.

Borrowing from another bard, Ben waxed poetic about one of the lineages in the long-term evolution experiment and raised a toast with this Shakespearean flask.

 

ODE TO AN LTEE LINEAGE

Shall I compare Ara-3 to a summer’s day?

Thou start more humbly, but sure potentiate.

Rough spins do shake the darling bugs of Rich’s gaze,

And latecomer’s “fleece” hath all to port citrate.

One line’s long-shot passed by eleven lines,

And how was its controlled complex “skin” pinned?

Promoter capture, over some time refined.

By chance, with nature’s arranging force, trimmed.

But thy Cit-minus partner shall not fade

Nor gain possession of the flair of most

C₄ shall Cit^– snag, now spawned by carbon trade

Then on it turns ‘til lines will species now boast

     So long these cells can achieve, so wise to see,

     So long lives this work- and awe is rife, Lenski.

 

Another Birthday Haiku

As I said in my last post, I just celebrated my 60^th birthday with lots of friends and family. Several folks produced new artistic works, including two lovely haikus that celebrate the E. coli long-term evolution experiment.

Here’s one from Mike Wiser, who did his doctoral research on the long-term lines. A highlight of his work was a paper showing that fitness trajectories in these populations tend to follow a power law, which has no upper bound, rather than an asymptotic rectangular, as I had previously assumed.

Living things adapt.
Evolution keeps going.
No peak yet in sight.

 

[The power-law model (blue) predicts future fitness gains much more accurately than does the hyperbolic model (red).  Image modified from Wiser et al. (2013, Science 342: 1364-1367) and shown here under the doctrine of fair use.]

Birthday Haiku

This past weekend I had my 60^th birthday. I was delighted to celebrate it with wonderful colleagues, students, friends, and family.

At a dinner roast and toast, everyone sang When We’re Sixty Four (Thousand), a tribute from the E. coli in the LTEE to the People of the Lab. And several friends came up with new contributions at the intersection of science and culture.

This beauty is from Andy Ellington, a professor in the Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology at the University of Texas and a member of the BEACON Center. As background, Andy coauthored a recent paper that helps to elucidate how one LTEE population evolved the novel ability to use citrate.

Without further ado, here’s his haiku …

Citrate just beyond.

Acetate potentiates.

Glucose is all gone.

 

[Image of citrate molecule from Wikimedia Commons]

Evolving Fun and Games

Science isn’t always fun and games. But sometimes it is!

This guest post is by Terry Soule, a computer scientist, and Barrie Robison, a biologist, both on the faculty at the University of Idaho. The BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action brings together biologists, computer scientists, and engineers to illuminate and harness the power of evolution as an on-going process.

With BEACON’s support, Terry and Barrie have developed a video game, called Darwin’s Demons, where you must fight off enemies that are evolving to defeat your best efforts!

Feel free to comment here.  However, please send any technical queries via email to Terry (tsoule@cs.uidaho.edu) and/or Barrie (brobison@uidaho.edu).

*****

Thanks to BEACON’s support, Polymorphic Games has created the evolutionary video game Darwin’s Demons, and placed it on the Steam website as part of the greenlight process.

Darwin’s Demons adds an evolutionary component and modern flair to an arcade classic.  Darwin’s Demons models biological evolution using enemies with digital genomes. Enemies acquire fitness by being the most aggressive, accurate, and longest lived, and only the most fit enemies pass their genomes to the next generation. The result? The creatures you found hardest to kill have all the babies, making each generation more challenging than the last!

The game includes in-game graphs for tracking evolution, displays the most fit enemies from each wave, and has an experiment mode where you can set parameters like the mutation rate, fitness function, etc.  It also dumps all of the evolutionary data to a file.  So, there are opportunities for experiments on user driven evolution if anyone is interested.  (We are more than happy to share the code and/or make simple modifications for controlled experiments.)

If you get the opportunity please try out the demo (downloadable at either of the sites listed above, with Windows, MAC, and Linux versions), vote for us on Steam, and send us comments, suggestions, or ideas for future directions and collaborations.

Thanks,

— Terry Soule (tsoule@cs.uidaho.edu), Computer Science, UI

— Barrie Robison (brobison@uidaho.edu), Biological Sciences, UI

 

[Darwin’s Demons: image from the Polymorphic Games website]

*****

 

Evolution Education in Action

This entry is a guest post by my MSU colleague Jim Smith. Jim is one of the PIs on an NSF-supported project to develop Avida-ED as a tool for learning about evolution in action and the nature and practice of science. (Besides Jim’s work with Avida-ED, many readers will be interested in Evo-Ed, a project where he and colleagues have developed teaching and learning materials organized around six case studies of evolution that integrate knowledge of the genetic, biochemical, physiological, and ecological processes at work.) Here is Jim’s report on the Avida-ED professional-development workshop that was recently held here at MSU.

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This past week, we had the pleasure of working together in a 2.5 day workshop with a group of biology faculty from across the country who are interested in evolution education.  As a part of our work in the NSF-funded Active LENS project, and as members of the BEACON NSF Science and Technology Center at Michigan State, our focus in this workshop was finding ways to incorporate the digital evolution software program, Avida-ED, into Biology course offerings.  Avida-ED allows students to understand evolution as an empirical science, where things can be studied and discovered via manipulative experiments, rather than solely as an historical science consisting mainly of observation and deep inference.

This Active-LENS Workshop brought together 20 biology teaching faculty over the course of 2.5 days to build lessons for their courses that incorporate Avida-ED.  On Day 1, we heard presentations from: Rob Pennock, who outlined what Avida-ED is, how it came to be, and why it is important; Rich Lenski, who introduced the group to his 28-year 65,000 generation long-term experimental evolution project and also described how the research platform, Avida, was used to evolve organisms with complex features; and Charles Ofria, who gave us a tour under the hood of Avida-ED, showing us how the program works on a computational level.

An Avidian and its offspring (with mutations) in Avida-ED.

In between these presentations, workshop participants were introduced to a new browser-based version of Avida-ED that is in its final stages of development.  Software developer Diane Blackwood is now “squashing bugs” in this beta version of Avida-ED (3.0), which will be released later this month.  Jim Smith then led the workshop participants through three hands-on exercises that allowed them to see first-hand how Avida-ED could be used in an educational setting to address specific misconceptions that students have about evolutionary processes.  For example, some students think that selection causes the mutations that are advantageous, so one exercise explores whether mutations that confer a beneficial trait arise sooner when selection favors the mutation than when it does not. We also introduced the participants to some independent research projects that our Introductory Cell and Molecular Biology students carried out using Avida-ED.

On Day 2, participants started on their journeys to develop their own Avida-ED lessons and spent most of the day doing so.  This was perhaps the most interesting and challenging part of the workshop, given that the participants came to us from a wide range of institutions and instructional settings.  Thus, each participant had his/her own set of opportunities and challenges to consider during the lesson planning sessions.

In conjunction with, and in between, bouts of lesson planning, Jim Smith introduced participants to and/or reminded them about how to use backward design to plan instruction.  In addition, Mike Wiser presented data showing how he has been using Avida to study fundamental research questions in evolutionary biology, and also presented results of research he has been doing as a member of our team to study impacts of the use of Avida-ED in educational settings.  Moshe Khurgel, who participated in last year’s Active-LENS workshop, described his Avida-ED implementation at Bridgewater College (VA) this past year, and provided the participants with a great set of tips and things to consider as they developed their own curricular pieces.  Louise Mead rounded out the set of presentations on Day 2 by providing participants with some basics on how to assess student learning, and how the work done by the participants would fit into the overall Discipline Based Education Research (DBER) goals of the Avida-ED team.

The big payoff came on Day 3, when each participant team presented their ideas for implementation of Avida-ED into their courses.  These were great! Projects that were presented ranged from the use of Avida-ED in a case-based framework utilizing oil spill remediation to explore how (and when) genetic variation arises in populations (Introductory Cell and Molecular Biology, Kristin Parent and Michaela TerAvest, Michigan State), to using Avida-ED to explore concepts in phylogenetics and compete organisms directly against each other in a March Madness framework (300-level Microbiology Lab, Greg Lang and Sean Buskirk, Lehigh University), to using Avida-ED to explore environmental effects on species diversity (300-level Ecology course, Kellie Kuhn and David Westmoreland, Air Force Academy). Many other creative and innovative ideas were presented by the other participants.

Events such as this 2.5 day workshop are true highlights of an academic life. Working with dedicated faculty who are motivated and energized by the prospect of creating excellent learning experiences for their students is a real pleasure.  It also gives one hope for the future of American science.

The best news is that we will be doing this 2.5 day workshop again next year. Sound like fun? If so, give one of us a shout (I’m at jimsmith@msu.edu), and we’ll see what we can do to have you join the group in the summer of 2017!

— Jim Smith

*****

Representing Science to My Representative

My research is funded by the National Science Foundation, including the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action. BEACON is one of a dozen or so NSF Science and Technology Centers. Today, our Representative in the US Congress, Mike Bishop, came to BEACON for 40 minutes to discuss our center—what we do, what impacts our work has, and so forth.

It was something of a “fire hose” for Mr. Bishop, with several presenters trying to convey a lot of information very quickly.  However, he was engaged and asked thoughtful questions.  I think he left with an understanding of the importance of scientific and engineering research, including how fundamental curiosity-driven research can lead to applications.

I had 10 minutes to show him my lab and explain what we do and why.  When I make a short presentation like this one, I often write out a version in advance.  I don’t read it or memorize it by any means. However, writing it out helps get my thoughts in order—removing details that aren’t important, ordering ideas into a narrative, reminding me of what I most want to convey.

I’m sure I was not as clear or coherent as the text that follows.  I offer it here because it conveys the points I tried to make in the few minutes that I had as a representative of science speaking with a representative of the people.

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I want to show you one of the experiments in my lab.  We call it the long-term evolution experiment. It’s an unusual experiment because it’s been running for over 27 years.  And we keep it going because it’s been a scientific goldmine leading to new discoveries about how bacteria change over time.

It’s important that we understand bacteria and how they evolve for many reasons. Bacteria are best known because some of them can cause dangerous infections. But many of them protect us against infections—if our guts were not filled with harmless bacteria, then the dangerous ones would have a much easier time getting established in our bodies. Some bacteria also provide nitrogen to plants and perform other essential functions in the environment, including degrading some of the wastes that we produce.  And some bacteria are the workhorses of biotechnology.

To give one example of why bacterial evolution is so important:  If bacteria didn’t evolve, we would have defeated nearly all the pathogenic bacteria on Earth with antibiotics.  But they do evolve and become resistant to our drugs, and so the pharmaceutical industry has to spend billions of dollars trying to keep up with the evolving bacteria and viruses by developing new drugs to treat infections.

It’s possible to see evolution-in-action in bacteria, like we do here, for several reasons.

• Their populations are huge.  The number of bacteria in just one of these little flasks is comparable to number of people in the United States.
• They grow really fast.  Every day, there are about 7 generations of bacteria in each of the flasks.  So each day we see the great-great-great-great-great grandkids, so to speak, of the bacteria that were in our flasks yesterday. After 27 years, the experiment has run for over 63,000 generations.
• And one more important thing about bacteria. We can freeze them and bring them back to life, and so we’ve got a frozen fossil record of the experiment.

When I started the experiment in 1988, there was no human genome project, and not even a single bacterial genome had been sequenced.  Now we go into our freezers and sequence the bacterial genomes to see how their DNA is changing over time.

The work we’ve done in this curiosity-driven experiment has inspired others who are using similar ideas and approaches to understand the rates and mechanisms of how bacteria evolve.

I’ll give two quick examples that show how our NSF-supported fundamental science gets translated into applications that are important for security and health.

First, you remember the anthrax letter attacks on Congress that occurred right after the 9/11 attacks. In the first few days after the anthrax attacks, I was contacted by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency for advice on how to identify the source of the strain used in that bioterrorism, and how to distinguish it from other related strains. And in the months that followed, I was asked for and provided advice to the FBI and other agencies investigating the attacks. Tracking the source of microbes in outbreaks—whether natural or terroristic in origin—requires understanding how they change over time.

Second, my colleague Prof. Martha Mulks studies bacteria that colonize the lungs of people with cystic fibrosis (CF).  There are about 30,000 people with this disease in the US alone.  It’s an inherited disease that makes people susceptible to lung infections and, unfortunately, those infections kill many kids and young adults with CF.  Some of the bacteria that infect the diseased lungs are not pathogens to most of us—they’re bacteria that live in soil and on plants, but when they get into the lungs of CF patients they evolve and adapt to that new environment. They also evolve resistance to the antibiotics that are meant to get rid of them. How exactly the various bacteria change to become better adapted to the CF lung environment is not known. Luckily, though, Martha Mulks and other foresighted scientists and clinicians have kept frozen samples of these bacteria over the years—just like we’ve done with the long-term experiment I described a moment ago. Now the BEACON Center is supporting work by a graduate student, Elizabeth Baird, who will analyze the DNA from old and new samples and apply some of the same approaches and methods that we’ve used and developed for the laboratory experiment to see how the bacteria have changed—how they have become resistant to antibiotics and otherwise adapted to the environment of the lungs of people who suffer from cystic fibrosis.

The bottom line is that the fundamental, curiosity-driven research that the National Science Foundation supports is also an engine for future applications—often ones that we may not even have dreamed of—as well as a training ground for the talented and dedicated young people who you can see working all around us in this lab and throughout the BEACON Center.

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Rep. Mike Bishop (MI-08) and me in the lab.  [Photo: Danielle Whitaker, MSU.]