October 19, 2009 • THE GAZETTE
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Montgomery Co. students get an early immersion in research By Robin Ferrier
Montgomery County Campus
DAVID CHISHAM
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cooping cups of beans into a container may not seem like a scientific learning experience, but it is when you equate those beans with the investment needed to take a drug from discovery to commercialization. “So, how many beans will it take to commercialize your drug?” asked Lynn Johnson Langer, senior associate program chair of Advanced Biotechnology Studies in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences’ Advanced Academic Programs, as part of her “Biotech as Today’s Business” activity. The group of seventh-grade students from Shady Grove Middle School in Gaithersburg, Md., debated how many beans to scoop before settling on $1 billion worth of beans. “One billion dollars?” asked Langer, once the students had piled up all those beans. “That’s a lot of money.” The students stood by their answer. Langer turned over a piece of cardboard with a value of … $1 billion. “Congratulations!” Langer said, applauding the students and handing out chocolate gold coins, the students’ “reward” for bringing their drug to market. The learning experience in “bean counting”—which included a segment on just how long it took for that same process— was just one of many activities the group of almost 200 seventh-graders undertook on Oct. 9 during the first Frontiers in Science and Medicine Day at Shady Grove Life Sciences Center, where the JHU Montgomery County campus is located. Frontiers in Science and Medicine was a collaborative event, spearheaded by Johns Hopkins Montgomery County and Shady Grove Adventist Hospital, that included participation from a dozen Montgomery
Lab-coated Demi Cephas and Zuri Banegas, seventh-graders from Shady Grove Middle School, work with raw DNA during Frontiers in Science and Medicine Day on the Johns Hopkins Montgomery County Campus.
County–based companies and organizations. During the day, students spent an hour participating in hands-on activities, an hour on a “site tour” of a company or research organization’s laboratory and 45 minutes engaged in small group discussions with scientists, doctors and nonscientific employees from local scientific organizations and companies. “We hope that this opportunity to see science happening, and to interact with scientists, helped generate excitement about the vast career opportunities in science and medicine,” said Elaine Amir, executive director of Johns Hopkins Montgomery County. “It’s important that we foster interest in science and medicine now, at a young age.” In an interview that morning, Christo-
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pher Austin, director of the NIH Chemical Genomics Center, one of the participating organizations, said, “My children often come home from school and talk with me about what they did in science class that day, claiming it’s not applicable in real life. Then I’ll tell them how I did that same procedure or process during work that day and why I did it, and suddenly their attitude toward what they learned—and toward science—changes. That’s what we hope we accomplished with Frontiers in Science and Medicine,” he said. While Langer’s activity focused on the business side of science, representatives from Johns Hopkins’ Biotechnology Program— along with representatives from MedImmune, the J. Craig Venter Institute, the NIH Chemical Genomics Center, Human
Genome Sciences, OpGen, Montgomery College, Universities at Shady Grove and Shady Grove Adventist Hospital—provided a plethora of fun, engaging science- and medicine-based activities. Ranging from “The Science of Cells” and “Meet Your DNA,” during which students made necklaces out of their own DNA, to “Know Your Bugs” and “Computers in Science,” a bioinformatics lesson on sickle-cell anemia by Bob Lessick of Johns Hopkins, the events showed students the full range of scientific pursuits possible. For those students less interested in science for its own sake, the day’s activities included “Become a YouTube Superstar,” during which representatives from the Tech Council of Maryland talked about creating science video podcasts; “Science Blogging,” with reps from BIO; and a handful of engineering activities from Montgomery College and Johns Hopkins, including opportunities to program robots and to learn about prosthetic limbs. During the on-site lab tours, students were given experiences ranging from looking at rat brains under microscopes at the Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute and trying on clean suits at TissueGene to witnessing eye color changes in genetically modified mosquitos at the Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology and watching the NIH Chemical Genomics Center’s experimental screening robot in action. (The robot can perform more than 2.2 million experiments per day.) Students also received a “lab notebook” that included questions for them to answer that would help them reflect on the day’s activities and what they had learned. “Whether they were learning about sequencing the human genome or about a cutting-edge surgical procedure, these students had an opportunity to see how classroom lessons are applied in real life,” said Dennis Hansen, president of Shady Grove Adventist Hospital.
R E S E A R C H
This is part of an occasional series on Johns Hopkins research funded by the American Recovery and Revitalization Act of 2009. If you have a study you would like to be considered for inclusion, contact Lisa De Nike at lde@jhu.edu. B y A m y L u n d ay
Homewood
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obert Moffitt, a Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Economics, and his research partner will use a oneyear $48,339 grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue to study whether the U.S. welfare system’s assistance based on marital status factors into single mothers’ decisions to stay single, cohabit or marry. The grant, underwritten by the federal stimulus package, will help Moffitt and Anne Winkler, a professor of economics and public policy administration at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, analyze data they gathered during a national telephone survey of welfare offices under a previous $10,000 grant from the Department of Health and Human Services. The researchers aim to demystify welfare’s complicated rules, which even Moffitt, who has spent his career studying labor economics and the welfare system, says he sometimes has trouble understanding. While most social scientists regard marriage as better for the children involved, individual states’ welfare policies don’t appear to support married parents, Moffitt says. In general, if a mother, a father and their children are
living in the same house, regardless of the parents’ marital status, the family won’t be eligible for welfare because their income will almost always be too high. Yet, if the mother and children are living on their own, with family or are cohabiting with a partner who is not the father of the children, the mother and children would be eligible for welfare, even if they are also being financially supported by other adults in the house. “The bad part is, you are telling the mother that if she brings in a man who is not the father of her children, it’s OK, but if she brings in the father of her children, she’ll be kicked off welfare,” Moffitt said. It gets even more complicated when caseworkers don’t understand the rules, which are determined by states and not the federal government. So Moffitt and Winkler are also setting out to determine whether welfare caseworkers understand their own rules and what the consequences are for the people who need their help. Moffitt’s study is one of more than 300 stimulus-funded research grants totaling more than $148 million that Johns Hopkins has garnered since Congress passed the American Recovery and Revitalization Act of 2009 (informally known by the acronym ARRA), bestowing on the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation $12.4 billion in extra money to underwrite research
will kirk / homewoodphoto.jhu.edu
Studying welfare’s treatment of single vs. married mothers
Robert Moffitt will use stimulus funds to determine whether U.S. welfare policies factor into whether single mothers decide to stay single, cohabit or marry.
grants by September 2010. The stimulus package—which provided $550 billion in new spending, including the above grants, and $275 billion in tax relief—is part of President Barack Obama’s plan to kick-start a stagnant economy by doling out dollars for transportation projects, infrastructure building, the development of new energy sources and job creation, and by financing research that will benefit humankind. ARRA grants received by Johns Hopkins affiliates have allowed for the creation to date of 63 jobs, 37 of which have been filled.
As they did with the first half of their research, Moffitt and Winkler will donate their time on the project, using the bulk of their grant to support one or two graduate students who will assist them. “NIH is best-known for funding biomedical and life sciences research, but it also funds the behavioral sciences, particularly related to population issues, which is a very important piece of what the NIH does,” Moffitt said. “It would be difficult for us to go on to the next phase of our research without this stimulus grant. We’re very fortunate to get funding.”