August 07, 2002
Summer in the City: East Meets West
Tan Aik Ling is learning to shop for fruits and vegetables in New
York. She examines one unfamiliar root and shoot after another. No
juicy mangosteens in leathery, eggplant-colored skins. No durians, the
lumpy, football-sized fruit that Singaporeans say “tastes like
heaven and smells like h***.”
Finally she buys a cabbage. “It’s the only thing I
recognized,” she explains.
“Igor Kiselev is learning gene array technology.”
Tan, whose first name is pronounced “Eggling,” has
taught biology to 9th and 10th graders in the island country of
Singapore for eight years. She's in New York this summer, sponsored by
the Singapore Ministry of Education, looking for ways to make the
subject matter more interesting to her students. She’s finding new
ideas in teaching and writing seminars run by Science Outreach, an
HHMI-supported program at The Rockefeller University, and in her work
in Nam-Hai Chua’s plant molecular biology laboratory there.
Igor Kiselev is also spending the summer studying and doing lab work
at Rockefeller, but this is a return visit for the high school biology
teacher from Moscow. He was selected from many applicants after a video
conference between HHMI and Moscow convinced Rockefeller’s HHMI
program director Bonnie Kaiser that teachers in Russia face the same
kinds of challenges as New York City teachers. Kiselev spent last
summer at Rockefeller, taking workshops with American teachers and
working in a gene array lab. This year he’s working on a new
project: a four-color labeling system for microarray slides.
2001 was a summer of firsts: the first time Kiselev had ever crossed
the Russian border and the first time Rockefeller’s Science
Outreach program had ever imported a teacher. It’s hard to say who
benefited more.
“I use the principles I learned at Rockefeller to teach my
students to design experiments and report results,” says Kiselev.
“I learn so much by seeing and working on the latest equipment
and techniques, by being around people who are doing this amazing
science.” For example, he says, “I had read about PCR
(polymerase chain reaction), but before I got here, I had never done it
or seen it done. PCR is one of the most important techniques in
molecular biology, and now I can tell my students and colleagues
exactly what is a PCR and how it works.”
In Russia, Kiselev explains, high school teachers and students
don’t have access to sophisticated laboratory equipment or current
textbooks and journals. “Our books and magazines are from the
1980s,” he says. Our experiments are on the macro level:
germination of seeds, studying single-celled organisms. My educational
technology is chalk and a blackboard. I am trying to prepare my
students to do 21st century science with 20th century tools.”
At the Second School Lyceum, a science and math high school for 7th
through 11th grades, Kiselev and fellow teachers built their own
television set so they could use videos in class. Next year, HHMI will
provide him with a DVD player and DVDs of the annual Holiday Lectures
on Science by HHMI investigators.
In Singapore, Tan has the technology. In well-equipped labs at River
Valley High School, she still needs ways to motivate her students
toward careers in science. “We are almost four million people
living on an island 14 miles wide and 25 miles long,” she says.
“We have no natural resources but our minds. We must develop a
knowledge-based economy.”
Tan had never worked in plant genetics. This summer, with her
mentor, Nandini Krishnamurthy, Tan is studying genes in
Arabidopsis that might play a role in cell death. They are
investigating whether the mechanism of cell death may be regulated by
genes that have some sequence similarities in plants and animals.
“I teach basic botany, not plant physiology and
genetics,” says Tan. “This work is bringing me way out of
my comfort zone, but that’s where all the learning takes place.
The more hands-on experience I get, the better my teaching will
be.”
Tan is the first person Krishnamurthy has mentored. Despite the time
it takes to show her what to do and how to do it, the Rockefeller
postdoctoral fellow likes having the teacher around. “I like
teaching, and she’s a fast learner,” Krishnamurthy says.
“If she inspires just one student to go on in science because of
something she learned here, it will all have been
worthwhile.”
Gregory Khitrov, director of Rockefeller’s Gene Array Resource
Center, initially was less enthusiastic when Kiselev arrived in his lab
last year. “I actually didn’t want anyone,” he
admits.” I was just getting the center up and running, and I
didn’t know what to do with him.”
But they were fellow Russians; Khitrov emigrated from Uzbekistan
with his family in 1990. So he welcomed Kiselev, and it didn’t
take the teacher long to find a niche. “He actually helped us
quite a lot,” says Khitrov. “He was able to break
boundaries and help us use our facility to develop labeling and
hybridization techniques that everyone at Rockefeller now
uses.”
Both foreign teachers have found time for new adventures outside the
lab too. Tan went kayaking on Long Island Sound with one of the
American teachers in her seminar. “One benefit of the program is
the friendships that develop,” she says. “These friendships
are a great gateway to exchanging ideas in the future.” Kiselev
fell in love with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “When I look at
paintings, I like to think about scientific problems,” he
explains. “The beautiful compositions help me organize my
thoughts into beautiful compositions.”
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Howard Hughes
