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Igniting the Spark: Another Look

By Ian McCluskey

Sometimes the most meaningful discoveries are accidental. That's one of the lessons from four Northwest researchers, who share their perspectives on developing a passion for science.

Grover Bagby—
Make It Relevant

As a young medical student, Grover Bagby planned to become a cardiologist, a popular choice with his classmates. One day, he was peering into a microscope, looking at a sample from a patient with acute leukemia. He noticed that the cells weren't doing what they were supposed to be doing and asked why. "I don't know," the doctor said, "no one does—why don't you find out?"

"He might have meant it offhand, like go look it up in the library—and not why don't you make it your life work—but that's how I took it," recalls Bagby. "It changed everything for me. That challenge was like a revelation."

Now the director of the Oregon Health & Science University Cancer Institute, Bagby grew up the son of a Methodist pastor. As such, he moved a lot. In high school, his family moved into the El Serino neighborhood of East Los Angeles. "It was a tough place," Bagby relates, but he also remembers the first day they moved in, hauling boxes into the house from the lawn, when a low-rider car pulled up. Two neighbors introduced themselves and invited Bagby over for dinner. The incident would seem insignificant at the time, but like the offhanded comment from the doctor, it would plant a seed in Bagby's sense of life purpose that would flower into a program mentoring underserved youth.

Since graduating from medical school in 1968, Bagby has devoted his research to finding cures for the incurable. His leukemia research deals with a family of genes called Fanconi anemia. They show up in stem cells, the cells in bone marrow that make blood cells, and—when mutated—lead to leukemia. His laboratory is examining the proteins these genes make, both mutated and normal, to figure out the differences that can lead to leukemia later on.

Since his student days, Bagby has been driven—not so much by cell mutation, but because those cells belong to people. When he was a medical student, and when he saw leukemia for the first time, he also saw the patient. She was a mother of three. And, she died shortly afterwards. "There was absolutely nothing we could do for her," Bagby remembers. "We didn't know the first thing about her disease."

His advice to teachers of science stems directly from this experience. "Sell the applicability of it," he recommends. "If you are teaching calculus, it's not just an equation—make it a NASA mission. In biology, it's not just a blood formation—it's a patient you're trying to save."

This winter, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society honored Bagby and the Cancer Institute he founded for demonstrating a steadfast commitment to finding cures for blood cancers and improving the lives of patients and their families. One of the projects he is most proud of as director of the Cancer Institute, though, is the Continuing Umbrella of Research Experience (CURE project), where high school juniors and seniors team up with a mentor and conduct research projects for nine weeks. The students are paid a weekly stipend and attend lectures focusing on new and innovative cancer research and discoveries. Just as Bagby came from an East L.A. neighborhood and was inspired by a mentor to search for a cure for leukemia, the program is designed to offer research experiences to Portland-area students who are socially and economically disadvantaged, in hope that students can gain hands-on research experience, and—with any luck—find a mentor who tosses them a problem needing to be solved.

Brenda Konar—
Get Your Hands Dirty

If not for a slippery strainer, marine scientist Brenda Konar and her colleague Katrin Iken would have missed an interesting discovery.

This past summer, the University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers and their team of graduate students were in Prince William Sound, conducting a survey of marine life as part of a global study of ocean biodiversity. As they ended their day, they started to sort through their collected samples. Iken had been cleaning a small strainer when she accidentally dropped it overboard. "Of course, we wanted to get it back," says Konar. "That's like 75 bucks." The graduate students, though, joked that the two professors just wanted an excuse to don their scuba gear.

Some 60 feet down in the murky water, they found the sieve, but they also found a bed of tiny balls of pink algae. "I just started grabbing and putting them in goody bags," Konar recalls. "It was just like an Easter egg hunt." They had chanced upon a colony of rhodoliths (hard balls of algae that roll like tumbleweeds in beds used as nurseries by scallops, shrimp, and other invertebrates). Konar, who has been diving and researching in Alaska for 15 years, had studied them in Baja but had never seen them so far north. "This is the first time I've come across something that nobody has ever seen before, which to me is mind-boggling," says Konar. "It shows that there is an awful lot more to learn, even in places like Prince William Sound."

Konar, who has done scientific dives from Antarctica to the Arctic Ocean, has come a long way since her childhood in San Jose, California. "Let's just say I wasn't into high school. I didn't have plans for college so I went to San Jose State, declared a business major—maybe to appease my parents, but also because I had a retail job which I hated."

So, she signed up for a couple of business classes and a couple of biology classes that sounded somewhat interesting. During her junior year, some of her friends persuaded Konar to learn scuba diving. As she neared graduation, she sat down with her academic advisor and counted credits. She called her parents. "Well, I have good news and bad," she said to them. "The good news is I have enough credits to graduate; the bad news is they are in biology."

A career in diving meant always proving herself at the start of each new job. As a graduate student, she corresponded with a prospective employer via e-mail. When she arrived at the job site, he realized she was a young woman. "Oh my god," he said, "you're Konar?" But she stepped in right beside his regular divers and performed the work quickly and professionally. "You learn to look at those who naysay women divers as a challenge," says Konar, chuckling. "Cool."

Now established, no one questions Konar's abilities. She is currently working on the Natural Geography in Shore Areas study, one of many Census of Marine Life projects. The census is an international biodiversity research endeavor involving scientists from two dozen nations and tapping every ocean. Estimated to take a decade to complete, the study is the most extensive project of its kind.

While much of Konar's life is taken up in the academic duties of research and grants, she says, "The coolest part is getting kids excited about the ocean." As most people in the Lower 48 states don't realize, it takes about as long to drive from the university in Fairbanks to the Kasitsna Bay laboratory on the Kenai Peninsula as it does to drive from Boise, Idaho, to the Oregon coast. Some kids in Fairbanks have never even seen the ocean. Konar takes her aquariums of live specimens into classrooms to talk about marine biology. "If you can move away from books and dead specimens to live specimens, that's a start," she says. "Show-and-tells are good, but even better, get kids out in the field."

One of the best things a high school teacher can do, she believes, is take the time to research internship and field study programs. She cites one program that offers an all-expense-paid trip for high-schoolers to spend part of their summer diving in Florida, Hawaii, and Alaska. "Let's admit it," she says, "not everything can be taught in a classroom." The programs are out there, says Konar, and many provide scholarships, so it's not a question of location or wealth; inner-city kids from Chicago can become deep-sea divers.

Getting started in her career, she acknowledges the advisors who trained her, and she hopes now, in turn, she is helping bring up the next generation. This spring she will return to the ocean to teach advanced scientific diving and give students an opportunity to work underwater on projects being conducted at the Kasitsna Bay lab.

This year, she will allow two high school students to join her diving team.

Peter von Hippel—
Science Is Part of History

Hans Biermann. The name springs instantly to Peter von Hippel's memory. Biermann grew up in Germany during World War I, then became a gaucho herding cattle on the Argentine Pampas, then a teacher of history and biology at the Cambridge School of Weston, a private high school in Massachusetts that had taken the young von Hippel on scholarship. "I don't even think Biermann had gone to college," recalls von Hippel, "but he had done a great deal of reading on his own." Biermann was the teacher von Hippel credits with teaching "more than the facts, but how to think."

Biermann made a point to learn his students' names, and to get to know them on a personal basis. If they yawned in class, he'd command them to stick their heads out the window. He'd consider a class a failure if it didn't generate discussion, relates von Hippel. "We didn't just learn the facts," he explains, "we learned how to manipulate them, how to make an argument, how to reason."

Inspired by his teacher with a passion for both history and science, von Hippel considered his future. Everyone else in his family had picked a path of science. His grand-uncle, Eugene von Hippel, discovered what is now known as von Hippel-Lindau disease, a genetic disease that causes erratic blood vessel growth. His grandfather, James Franck, was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. His dad, Arthur von Hippel, was a renowned professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who contributed to the development of radar. Science, von Hippel decided, looked ahead, while history looked back at what had already happened. Von Hippel wanted to make things happen.

He enrolled at MIT, where he would remain until earning his Ph.D., and then devoted his career to microbiology and his students. In 1978, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and, in the following year, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Now a professor emeritus at University of Oregon, von Hippel has some friendly advice for today's science teachers. "Don't just throw out facts," he advises. "Go back and help students figure out how those facts were discovered." He encourages teachers to do the historic background research to help students understand: "Put yourself in the mind of the people who advanced science—what did they know, what didn't they know?"

Last spring, von Hippel was elected to the American Philosophical Society, one of the highest tributes for an academician. Von Hippel, 73, is one of two living Oregonians to hold the honor. The Society's membership list—including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Linus Pauling—could serve as the syllabus for a history class or a science class, or for von Hipple's high school mentor, both.

Jeanne Quint Benoliel—
Bring It Home

Jeanne Benoliel is retired now, and when not making trips to the doctor or visits to friends for tea, she can look back at her career as a chapter of history. "I was lucky to be at the right place, at the right time," she says.

Through pioneering studies of death and dying, Benoliel, professor emerita of psychosocial and community health nursing at University of Washington, helped health-care professionals and families better address the needs of the terminally ill. As a nurse, researcher, teacher, and author, Benoliel's work has yielded new forms of treatment and care for dying patients, particularly those afflicted with cancer.

"Things were different then," she explains. When Benoliel was growing up, she saw only three career paths available to women: homemaker, school teacher, or nurse. Her mother was a nurse. She became a nurse. World War II started. She was sent to the South Pacific. She saw death. She saw shell shock. The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Then the second. Then the GIs returned home, went to college, started jobs and families. No one wanted to talk about death.

"We take it for granted now," says Benoliel, "but after the war, in the '50s, everything changed." Intensive Care Units became part of hospitals, CPR became commonly taught. New technology and new medical advancements made breakthroughs in saving or prolonging lives. "The flip side of that," says Benoliel, "is that most doctors wouldn't even admit that they had dying patients."

Early in her research career, Benoliel focused on patients with breast cancer. At that time there were no mammograms. A biopsy was taken, and if found malignant, a radical mastectomy was performed. "It was... well... ,"Benoliel searches for the word, "a rather merciless procedure." Whether such a drastic operation had emotional or other side effects was hardly a question if it saved a woman's life. But Benoliel asked that question. She began some of the first work on the psychosocial impact of radical cancer surgery and the need for scientific nursing practice.

It was, at the time, a significant shift in the role of a nurse. A nurse's duty was to change bandages and empty bedpans—not to pester a doctor's patients with research. The physicians (all men) were the gatekeepers to the patients, and Benoliel learned that she would have to go through them to conduct her studies. "You learned to play the game," she said. "You look for a crack in the door, and you push." In the process, she learned how to become a scientist. "Nurses collect information to help people," she explains, "and they assume certain things as given, in order to perform their work. Scientists, on the other hand, step back, observe, and ask, Why is this so?"

For Benoliel, it meant a shift from being a nurse, to becoming a nurse-scientist. Now, she says, it's standard in the field to have nurse-physiologists, nurse-pathologists, and so on. At the University of Washington, Benoliel developed a graduate program in oncology transition services. She was the first registered nurse to be president of the International Work Group on Death, Dying, and Bereavement. For her contributions to the field of cancer nursing and her four decades of research in end-of-life care, Benoliel was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Medical Sciences degree from Yale University, the Oncology Nursing Society Lifetime Achievement Award, and was named a Living Legend by the American Academy of Nursing.

As a teacher, she drew from her own life, believing that direct experience sparks involvement. "I always start where the students are and get them talking about their experience," she says. For her courses on death and dying, she had students go out into the community and interview not only doctors in hospitals, but anyone else whose work involved direct experience in death, dying, and bereavement. Her students talked to police officers, firefighters, clergy, grief counselors, and coroners. Her students began to see death and dying beyond the hospital experience and as a community experience. "That's when you start to see it as something larger," says Benoliel. "That's when the connections get made.

"It's not as easy as lecturing from a book—it's asking teachers to get their students to move beyond an intellectual understanding of something and to relate it to their own lives, on a gut level. And that's hard. But isn't that the secret of learning—to discover something for yourself?"