Washington University School of Medicine nurtures minority researchers
By Chris King Of the St. Louis American
On Tuesday a group of minority youth, all but one of them African-American, spoke one after the other about hookups and flow. But they weren’t talking about clubbing or rap styles. They were talking about the molecular hookups between blood vessels and the flow charts that structure extended research projects.
These eight, exceedingly bright college students from all over the country spent their summer in St. Louis, working diligently in labs as part of the new Opportunities in Genomics Research summer program at the Washington University School of Medicine.
Ashiya Buckels is a sophomore from Spelman College who grew up in St. Louis and graduated from Rosati-Kain High School. She spent her summer studying the blood vessels in the fin of the zebra fish because the genetic information coded there can open windows into understanding how any tissue grows and heals.
“You actually get to study development, at the molecular level,” Buckels said of her work with Stephen L. Johnson in the Department of Genetics at the Washington University School of Medicine.
“That’s how you find cures for these cancers.”
The summer program is sponsored by the Washington University School of Medicine Genome Sequencing Center’s Department of Outreach. Its goal is to diversify the research disciplines of the life sciences.
“There is a huge gap in the number of minorities who obtain Ph.Ds,” said Cherilynn Shadding, director of outreach for the Genome Sequencing Center, who herself has a Ph.D. in physiology from Meharry Medical College.
“With increasing diversity in science, we increase the diversity of thought processes. With so many problems to be solved, increasing diversity means increasing the numbers of solutions.”
Students in the program will be able to return each summer until they graduate from college, as long as they remain in good academic standing – with encouraging and nurturing toward advanced study every step of the way.
Judging by the students’ enthusiasm and poise in delivering their final Power Point presentations on Tuesday, they will return to Fisk University, Tuskegee University and the University of Texas at El Paso with genetic research in their veins.
“It really turned me onto genetics,” Buckels said of her summer in the lab.
“This is a new and rising field. So much work is being done and needs to be done.”
With the help of many mentors from the university and the Association of Black Biomedical Students, these eight young men and women made small advances in understanding specific aspects of the ongoing work to understand the genome and apply this understanding to illness and health.
The titles of their presentations – and, indeed, the content – would be unintelligible to anyone who hasn’t learned the basics of genetics and molecular biology. But the students fluently discussed things like outer doublet microtubules, multiple published protocols, genome sequencing software and organisms like Caenorhabditis elegans, a roundworm whose genetic information is a juicy enough subject to have spawned two Nobel prizes for scientists who researched it.
For all their poise, the students started the summer as novices in the sophisticated research environment of a world-class medical institution.
“This was my first solid, actual lab experience. I learned to follow protocols and procedures and analyze different data,” said Devin S. Luckett, a sophomore at Purdue University who graduated from University City High School.
As the sole male in his graduating class, Luckett showed evidence of another disparity in advanced study – the gender disparity among African Americans.
“I’m proud of him being a minority male in a profession that not many minority men seek,” said his mother, Glenda Luckett.
“It’s a great feeling being a young mom and being able to guide him in the right direction to pursue his goals, even though they are not the norm of society today.”
Though a minority in both gender and race, Luckett showed such promise in his presentation on defects in flagella that he prompted a scientist in the audience to ask a detailed professional question that would have been beyond any beginning student’s grasp.
“I apologize for popping that question on you,” the man apologized after the presentation, “but it was such an interesting project that I forgot you were a student.”
More than one student learned the hard way a bitter fact of research – namely, that sometimes the only thing you find out is that there wasn’t anything very valuable to find out starting with your hypothesis and methodology.
Asked about facing such disappointment, one student, Morgan R. Williams, said, “Research takes years and years and years and years and years and years to be successful. I just have to do more years and years and years of research.”
The other graduates of the first-ever Opportunities in Genomics Research summer program were Olivia Knowles, Afua Asante, Brittny Davis, Miriam Ortiz, and Lakendra Wiley.
Funding for the program is provided by the National Human Genome Research Institute’s Minority Action Plan. For more information about the program, contact Cherilynn Shadding at cshaddin@watson.wustl.edu.
