Duke University | Howard Hughes Undergraduate Program

Well, I just stood in front of a poster and answered questions about it for 90 minutes, which I guess means that the Howard Hughes Research Fellows program has come to an end. Sometimes the eight weeks dragged on and sometimes they flew by, but now they’re over, and it’s time for me to move on to the rest of the summer and to my next year of school.

I still have two blog topics left to write about, so for the sake of convenience (which really means laziness), I’ll put them into the same post. First I’ll reflect on the experience: Overall, I enjoyed it. I learned a lot about the techniques of field ecology and how an ecology lab works. I also learned a lot about the principles of ecology, but not quite as much as I’d expected. I guess that’s what courses are for. What I didn’t expect to learn a lot about were other fields of biology, but with the seminars, the chalk talks, the poster session, and my interactions with other people in the program, I learned about biology at all sorts of levels, and I got a sense of the multitude of techniques used to study it. I suppose if I could change one thing about the program, it would probably be the amount of responsibility I had in my lab. I never felt that the whole project was riding on my shoulders, but sometimes I felt like a good chunk of it was, and that could get a bit overwhelming. Still, with less responsibility, it’s doubtful I would have learned as much. I guess the quickest way to learn to swim is to jump into the deep end. Just as long as you don’t drown.

I didn’t drown in my lab, and if I dive into research as a career, it’s unlikely that I’ll drown there either. I’m still not sure I want to do that, though. I know I want to work with environmental conservation, but that’s a field that can be approached many different ways. In that sense, it’s a lot like the field of medicine. If you study medicine, you can go into a career that deals with finding new information (i.e. biomedical research), you can go into a career that applies information to real-world problems (i.e. becoming a doctor), or you can do some combination of the two. It’s the same with conservation, and I still haven’t decided whether I’m interested in research, application, or both. The Howard Hughes program gave me a good idea of what ecological research looks like, and I like the way it looks, but do I really want to make it my career? I have no idea right now, but thankfully I have a long time to decide, or at least I think I do. As I learned from the past eight weeks, what at first seems like forever can actually go by in no time. It feels like it’s just begun, and then, in the blink of an eye, it’s over.
 

According to Roman lore, Julius Caesar once conquered an entire city in four hours. I’ve been working hard for six weeks, which, at Caesar’s pace, would give me enough time to conquer the world. As you probably noticed, I’m not yet the supreme chancellor of Earth, so what have I been doing with my six weeks?

Well, there have been a few setbacks, but I’ve managed to make decent progress in my research. I now have over six hundred tree cores, and barring thunderstorms, I should be able to finish up in the field tomorrow. I still need to turn those raw cores into useable data, though, so if I want to get enough data for my poster, next week will have to be a marathon of gluing, sanding, processing, and analyzing. Luckily, thanks to the guys at the machine shop, I got the stage fixed a lot more quickly than I anticipated (as I mentioned in my last blog, the stage what I use to measure the distance between tree rings). I just want to plug the machine shop for a second, because until last week, I had no idea it even existed. The machine shop is in the basement of the Physics building, and if you ever have a mechanical problem with lab equipment, you can bring it there and they’ll probably know how to fix it. Check it out if you’re interested: (http://www.phy.duke.edu/facilities/shops.php).

Anyway, I spent this week coring trees with help from some of the lab techs. Coring goes so quickly with a four-person team! Some days we got over a hundred cores. We also got a new shipment of corers to use, but most of them turned out to be pretty terrible. We have to send them back, which is frustrating. Part of me is glad, though, because it means I get to keep the corer I’ve been using, which I borrowed from the forestry supply closet a few weeks ago. It works much better than any other corer I’ve used, and it has a blue handle, so I nicknamed it “Old Blue” (because only cool people name their scientific equipment).

Peter testing some of the new corers and making the tree into a pin cushion

Thanks to Old Blue and the lab techs (what a great potential band name!), I did a lot this week, but I have even more to do next week, and realistically, even Caesar wouldn’t have been able to get it all done (although I doubt Caesar would have been all that into ecology). It looks like I won’t be able to get all the data I want, but I should be able to get a fair amount. Definitely enough to make some sort of presentable conclusions. Six weeks ago, I came to the Howard Hughes program, this week, I saw what was left for me to do, and hopefully, after next week, I’ll have conquered the poster.
 

In my first blog, I wrote about how problems are inevitable in scientific research. Luckily, wherever there’s a problem, there’s usually a solution lurking not too far away. In the case of my difficulty with increment corers (which are used to extract cores from trees), the solution was to use newer, sharper corers than the ones I had been using. It also helped that after a few weeks of coring, I got better at it and was able to core more quickly. Things in the field are going smoothly now, and with help from Peter, the technician whose been coring with me, I now have over three hundred cores. That means I have a lot of gluing, sanding, and measuring do to back in the lab. A day of sharp coring leads to at least two days of dull lab work.

Of course, lab work can have just as many problems as field work. Shortly after I started using the new corers, the stage (the instrument I use to measure the distance between tree rings) stopped working. The stage consists of a moveable platform with a device on the side that measures how far the platform has moved. When the stage is working properly, I turn a crank that slowly moves the platform and look at the core on a small screen hooked up to a microscope. Whenever I see a ring in the crosshairs on the screen, I press a button, and a computer program logs the distance that has passed since the last ring. However, the crank doesn’t move the platform any more. I turn it around and around, and nothing happens. Yesterday, after Jim (the PI), Peter, and I dismantled the platform, we decided that the grooves holding the platform to the crank had been stripped, so I called the company that made the stage and spoke to someone named Alan. The call went something like this:

Me: Hi, I have a support question about one of your products.
Alan: What’s the product number?
(I read him the product number, which I forget right now)
Alan: You have one of those! Wow, I didn’t know anybody was still using those. What’s the problem?
Me: Well, when I turn the crank nothing happens. The platform doesn’t move. So I took it apart, and…
Alan (laughs at me): You took it apart! Oh, you’ve done it now. You’ve really done it now.
Me: Was that bad?
Alan: Probably. I’m going to transfer you to Kevin, and he’ll tell you what to do.

Kevin told me that I needed to send the platform back, along with a sheet that he would fax to me. Finding a fax machine in the 21st century is no easy task, but I found one, and he faxed me the sheet. He also told me that by taking apart the stage, we might have damaged it further, breaking a fragile glass strip that somehow connected to the measuring device. This turned out not to have happened, but I got pretty worried. Even though the stage didn’t break from its dismemberment, it still looks like we’ll have to send the platform to the company, which could take a while.
 

At the end of the day yesterday, Jim found another, even older stage lying around the lab, and I went in today to try and hook it up to the computer. After arranging the platform, the measuring device, and the computer several different ways, nothing seemed to work. I now have no stage to work with, and because my research depends on measuring the distance between rings, it’s getting a bit frustrating. Still, I know there’s a solution lurking out there somewhere, and if I look thoroughly, I’m bound to find it sooner or later. Until then, I have plenty of gluing and sanding to do.
 

Last week, the other Howard Hughes fellows and I watched And the Band Played On, a movie about the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic in the 80s. If I were a film critic, I would have written this blog about the dragging pace of the two-and-a-half hour movie, or its performances that ran hot and cold, or its lackluster 1990s-made-for-TV production values, but I’m not a film critic, so instead I’ll write about the issues brought up in the movie, which, despite the flawed filmmaking, were intriguing and well-developed.

The issue of Responsible Conduct in Research is flagrantly disregarded by one of the characters, Dr. Robert Gallo, who is played by Alan Alda. I’m sure the real Dr. Gallo was less than thrilled with this one-sidedly negative portrayal, but assuming the movie is accurate, Dr. Gallo’s behavior is a prime example of how not to responsibly conduct research. In the movie, Gallo repeatedly takes credit for discoveries made at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, creating a dispute for recognition that delays the treatment of people around the world suffering and dying from AIDS. His ego gets in the way of scientific objectivity, and the rest of the world pays the price. Obviously, that’s not how research should work. Researchers should acknowledge any previous work they have benefitted from, and they should worry more about making discoveries than taking credit for them. As I’m learning from the work I’m doing, effective research takes a lot of time and effort, and if I found out someone else had taken credit for the data I’ve collected, I’d get wicked pissed.

Another issue in the movie is the relationship between science and policy. Often, the scientists in the movie make a discovery, but the government is hesitant to act on it because it does not want to upset the gay community or other groups. Medical institutions are also hesitant to act because they are worried about costs of certain procedures. During a board meeting in which doctors decide not to implement a test that is almost 90% effective in detecting HIV in blood for transfusions, one doctor claims that the others have started to act less like doctors and more like businessmen. The translation of science into policy is still a major issue today. One case that comes to mind is that of climate change. For years, the consensus among climate scientists has been that human activity has caused dangerous and almost irreparable damage to the earth’s climatic patterns, but policymakers are still hesitant to act because of costs and because of a few dissenting voices.

It’s great to learn about biological systems, but to truly use what we’ve learned, we need to understand another system, the human social system. This is the system that is all around us, and it is just as intricate and as difficult to manipulate as any system inside us.
 

In the interview I had with Dr. Clark last week, he told me that the main goal of his research was to better understand the factors responsible for diversity in forest ecosystems. Or in other words, he wants to answer the question “What makes forests so diverse?”
 

Because I am working in Dr. Clark’s lab, I too want to answer this question , but it is a question that can never be answered completely. It can only be broken up into simpler questions, and those questions can only be answered after thorough research.
 

That’s where I come in. The question I am trying to answer, my research question, deals with a specific aspect of the forest: canopy gaps. Forests are powered by the sun, and most of the sunlight that hits the forest goes to the tallest trees, whose leaves form a layer called the canopy. The layer below the canopy is called the understory, and the trees there do not have enough light or space to grow as tall as the canopy trees. However, when canopy trees fall, trees in the understory take advantage of the newly available resources, and they grow to replace the fallen trees in a process called recruitment. Almost a decade ago, the Clark lab pulled down dominant trees at several sites in the Duke forest, creating canopy gaps, and now recruitment has taken place in those gaps. This brings me to my research question: How has tree growth within the gaps differed from tree growth outside the gaps?
 

I expect that the growth inside the gaps has occurred much more quickly than the growth outside the gaps, but I would like to know how much faster this growth has been, and I would also like to know how much it has differed between different species. Hopefully, weeks of taking and analyzing cores will help me find an answer, but I don’t expect anything definitive. No matter what I find, there’s bound to be something left to wonder about. In science, nothing is certain but uncertainty.

Here are some pictures of what I've been doing:

A tree being cored

A day's worth of cores, stored in straws and a PVC pipe. Pretty high tech stuff.