From a presentation by MORE Director Clifton Poodry, Ph.D., to the American Society of Plant Biologists
July 20, 2009
Plant Scientists Have Played Important Roles in my Career Development
It gives me great pleasure to speak to plant scientists, not just because NIGMS is a significant funder of plant research with some 300 grants or because we have a new initiative to understand the transcriptome of medicinal plants, but because I owe a great deal to plant scientists who have played key roles in my scientific development. I want to mention several in particular.
Dr. Melvin Calvin
As a high school sophomore in 1957, I was browsing through a book that happened to be in the room of my chemistry teacher. In it I found the statement that the most important unsolved mystery in the chemistry of life is the process of photosynthesis, and that Melvin Calvin was the foremost authority on the topic. It gave his address. I wrote to Dr. Calvin and asked for information about photosynthesis. He answered. He sent me a reprint as well as a thick progress report for his DOE grant. Wow! What’s the chance that a kid from the reservation would have the audacity to write to a scientist to ask about science? The book said that it was the most important unsolved mystery.. And what’s the chance that the scientist would answer? By struggling through the reprint and report , backed up by Scientific American review articles, I learned about the path of carbon in photosynthesis as a high school student. I even grew chlorella and played with paper chromatography and incorporation of 14C. That was a truly exciting opportunity for a small town high school.
Dr. Joseph Hindman
My career objective in college was to be a high school football coach and a high school science teacher. I was a C student and a football player. But I was injured in the preseason practice my senior year. While I was out having knee surgery, I missed registration and the only classes left were those that for various reasons were undersubscribed. So I ended up in a comparative plant anatomy class. The professor was Joseph Hindman. The first day of class he saw the cast and crutches and asked about the injury. He didn’t believe that a biology major was on the varsity football team but his friend, Coach Buddy Ryan, confirmed that I was. So because Dr. Hindman knew who I was and he was a friend of the coach, I couldn’t skip class and I couldn’t sleep in class. Consequently I learned about things such as the vessels of vascular plants, their walls and pits. I learned about the merristem d’ attente and l’annaeau initiale and - and I got an “A” in the class. To my surprise, paying attention works. I took another class from Professor Hindman in which he taught me a very practical skill, preparing and staining serial sections for histological examination. I got an “A” in that class too but equally important to me, he asked to keep my slides. Most people did allium root tip but I did a carrot and also a banana stem. He liked my independence. And his interest did wonders for me.
Dr. Mary Clutter
Another plant scientist important to my career is Mary Clutter, who hired me as a rotator at NSF and was absolutely the best supervisor I ever had in any position, anywhere.
So why didn’t I follow a path to plant sciences? Remember I said that the last course that I would want was plant anatomy or anything botanical for that matter. My experience with a first year botany class told me that botany was mainly about memorizing esoteric facts. I recall to this day, almost a half century later, the emphasis the instructor put on the fact that the Gnetales were the exception to the rule that angiosperms have certain vessel elements that gymnosperms do not. So of course I knew that would be on the test and it was. A lab exercise that had us walking around the campus with a taxonomy key did as much as anything to put me off plants. And why did we have to memorize Latin names for common plants? But years later I delighted in knowing that the trees outside my office window were Sequoia sempervirens and Arbutus menziesii. Also, I am fascinated by the great variation in the genus Quercus, the oaks. I even guessed correctly that a fossil specimen was Quercus based on its ray structure. But back then as a student, wandering around campus with a key and learning Latin names did not do it for me.
"In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have." - Lee Iacocca
My interest in plants has been rekindled and taken a different turn in the last few years. I am a semi-professional woodturner. I strive to understand wood, its sources, its structure, its pests and pathogens and its diversity of characteristics. The woodshop and lathe have replaced the lab and lab equipment for me; but many of the same issues of education, of creativity, of discovery and of sharing remain important. Woodturning has given me new perspectives and insights.
Although I teach woodturning, I am still very much a student. I think that I have learned more about teaching from teaching woodturning than I had in 22 years of teaching biology courses as a professor. I’m going to tell you a few stories that I believe have lessons for teaching and learning and maybe mentoring.
I’ve learned that all of us as parents, as teachers and as a society, overvalue talent – aptitude – at the expense of valuing work or effort. In high school I was not allowed to take an art class. I had done poorly in a lettering test and I was deemed to be devoid of artistic aptitude. And it is true. I can’t draw, I can’t visualize, I have little artistic imagination. But I love to try. I aspire to be a good craftsman and even a wood artist. I strive to be creative. We may have different natural abilities but I believe that you can develop your talent. It takes work, perhaps more than most will commit. As a teacher/scientist/mentor and parent, I want to understand the development of talent, the nurturing of curiosity, the fostering of creativity.
They say that there is no such thing as a bad question. Can there be bad good answers? One of the challenges is to strike a balance between answering questions and providing direction or guidance to help students find their own answers.
When I was a little boy I asked my mom what those things are all over the strawberry. Seeds, she said. Oh good, let’s plant them. Then she told me that the seeds on a strawberry were sterile. She said that strawberries propagate by way of runners. She showed me and I saw it was true. A half century later I wondered where the various cultivars of strawberries came from. Were they mutants selected from somatic clones – found in new plants from the runners? A strawberry breeder told me the obvious. They select from plants grown from the seeds. What?! I had always thought they were sterile. I learned how to collect the seeds and “harden” them with cold treatment. I then planted hundreds of seeds. Plants grew. My mom was wrong. Although plants grew few made it to mature fruit bearing plants. The commercial strawberry is octaploid and not very fertile. So for practical purposes you could say my mom was right. Here is an example that our knowledge, our beliefs, are very powerful and long lasting. It’s when new information conflicts with existing knowledge, something has to change. It is then that we modify our beliefs (or reject the new data). There are two points that I want to make with this story. First, while good viable explanations make us feel good as teachers, are satisfying to us and to students, they can halt the questioning and worse, relieve us of the need to think further.
There is Nothing Like a Good Answer to Stifle Thinking
Second, learning is a process that confronts what you know or believe with new experience that has to be incorporated into the explanation. Students don’t come to us with empty heads. They have a set of beliefs, a way of understanding the world. Understanding their misconceptions may be the most important step in helping them learn new material. In my opinion, in order to attract bright students to study plant sciences, you need to point out the important problems that the next generation will need to solve and not stifle them at the outset with answers and an encyclopedic description of all plants on earth.
But let me tell you what had me trying to understand a bit of plant biology lately. I read that anthropologists could chart the spread of corn throughout the Americas by studying the ratio of carbon isotopes. How does that work? C4 plants have different isotope incorporation ratios compared to C3 plants – and corn is a C4 plant. (but what if people ate animals that were C4 grazers?). What are C4/C3 plants and why do they incorporate isotopes differently? Is their CO2 incorporation efficiency because of enzymes or special cell structure? Can C3 plants be made more efficient? Does increased CO2 reduce the advantage of C4 plants? For me, these and many other questions make plants really interesting.
Lessons from Teaching Woodturning
- Feedback is critical for improvement.
- Practice makes permanent.
- Know your student.
Feedback is critical to our improvement. It provides motivation and it gives us satisfaction (reward). It is also essential for learning the skills needed for the task at hand.
When I was a teenager I tried to craft arrowheads from local flint. Being native, I thought it was a skill that I should know. All I got was frustration. So much for native skills. Some years later, I read how Ishi made arrowheads from broken glass from wine bottles and I saw a picture of how he held the material. I tried it and it worked perfectly. So what made the difference? First, I had a guide on the orientation of the tool. Second, the glass fractured in very predictable ways – unlike the flint – so I learned quickly what to do right and how to do it wrong. Feedback! I was able to go from bottle glass to obsidian, and then to agate and finally to flint. By the time I got to agate and flint, with their natural cracks and other flaws, I knew the basic technique to apply and was not thrown off by aberrant fractures.
Getting back to wood, there are three variables in woodturning that contribute to a result (feedback). The tool, the wood, your technique. When teaching, I make sure all tools are super sharp. I try to provide straight grained hardwood. Technique becomes the variable that gives the student feedback.
Practice makes …..permanent. When working at the lathe, like most other endeavors, we develop habits. Some are good and some are not. Practice of bad technique can make it permanent. The same probably goes for thinking.
Faculty, you can provide the most useful feedback if you know a lot about the student and where they are in their development and when what they really need is a wine bottle. In science it is about much more than proficiencies with techniques. You need to see the habits of mind that students are developing.
A famous wood turner has said, “Life’s too short to turn bad wood.” Here is a challenging piece of wood. It will likely take more time to work with it than can be retrieved in the sale price. (photo not shown of a very rugged piece of spalted maple wood).
But with work, it can be very presentable and personally very rewarding. It is a metaphor for the grooming of a risky student, taking the chance and putting in the extra effort in for an uncertain outcome. (photo not shown of a very nice bowl of spalted maple).
Sometimes the flaws, from one perspective, turn out to be assets from another. I am lucky that my major professor, Howard Schneiderman, overlooked some of the challenges and flaws in the wood that was me.
As a teacher of turning, I want to teach technique and still encourage creativity. One of the more important questions that I learned from master turner and teacher David Ellsworth, is to ask why students are taking the class. They paid to take the class. What do they expect or hope to get out of it? What do they already know and what are their misconceptions? Knowing the students background and expectations will help guide the approach to teaching.
Creativity. How do you teach it? How can we nurture it? Or do we assume that they have it or they don’t? Maybe we just try to avoid sucking the joy and creativity out of a person with thoughtless teaching.
Woodturning, like mentoring, is not without costs and risks. And not all projects lead to happy outcomes.
Speaking of risk, I believe that a certain amount of risk is important to learning. I pay more attention when there is a modest amount of risk than I do when there is nothing to lose. If I were to practice on a block of wood ordinaire, I wouldn’t have the focus or intensity that I would if the piece could ultimately be for sale. Of course too much risk can be paralyzing. You have to balance the benefits of risk with the potential costs, tuition if you will, of mistakes. Yes, there is risk. But when it works it is well worth it.
There are times, when to achieve other ends, we may accept students into programs who might be considered risks. How can we take the risk out of taking students with non-standard profiles? Here are three ways. First, you have to assess the persons skills as well as their motives and drivers. Second, provide guidance and a challenging but do-able path toward objectives. Third, provide feedback.
What Qualities Do We Want in the Next Generation of Plant Biologists?
- Curious
- Communicative
- Creative
- Logical
- Insightful
- Careful
- Quantitative
- Computational
- Multidisciplinary
- Ethical
- Broadly Knowledgeable about plants as well as other related sciences
- Representative of the breadth of our population
Here is a quick list of qualities that I imagined would be important for plant sciences of 2020 and beyond. It’s one thing to put together a list, but how do we get there? We spend a lot of energy thinking about how to attract and select the best and the brightest and too little on what it means to train, to develop the skills and abilities of the trainees. I see too little focus on how to make the best and brightest even better, better than they are now and better than even they think they can be. If these are qualities you want in your graduates, you need to take action and develop training programs that will coach and enhance the skills and habits of mind that you want to see.
You can no doubt come up with a better list of qualities that you want to see in the next generation of plant biologists. But what defines the training? Is a compendium of required courses enough? Is the model of an apprenticeship under the tutelage of an outstanding researcher/mentor sufficiently reliable to develop the numbers, the quality, the breadth, and the diversity that is needed in the next generation of plant biologists?
When We Say We Value Diversity, What is it that We Value?
I couldn’t talk about training without talking about the importance of diversity. But I’m not going to give you a bunch of numbers to show you the degree of underrepresention of certain groups in our country. I’m not going to elaborate the importance of a diverse scientific workforce to the US or global economy. I’m not going to discuss the importance of a diverse research workforce to understanding and eliminating health disparities. I’m not even going to discuss the moral stance that providing equal opportunities is simply the right thing to do. Instead, I want to tell you that we at NIGMS value the potential new ideas, the potential new approaches to solving problems, that come from a variety of perspectives, the different points of view that, in turn, are shaped by various lived experiences of our colleagues in the research and training community. Why do we need a diversity of thinking? Because when we all think alike no one has to think at all. And I will add that diversity is more interesting, more fun and more enlightening.
I want to add a caution. In our press for diversity in our organization and in graduate programs, we have to be mindful to value people for what they bring to their primary roles and responsibilities, not merely their presence that adds to our numerical diversity. We value their input, their thoughts, values, and perspectives that create an inclusive environment.
Who are you? How do you characterize yourself? How do you appear to others and does their characterization affect how you view yourself and your strengths? If you were hired or admitted to a program because you are a good scientist who has made, or is capable of making, important contributions as a scholar, might you be likely to emphasize and want to continue your scholarship? But suppose that what people seem to notice and value most about you is your gender or your ethnicity? What if, in their quest to celebrate diversity, people seem to value your presence more than your contributions? What if they turn to you for comment or advice on diversity issues but not on your scientific expertise? How does the way others see you, or what others expect and value about you, influence what you value or emphasize about yourself?
It is not unreasonable that students or colleagues take on the mantle of defenders of diversity and of representing their gender or ethnicity if they are made, by default, the local experts. They may actually embrace the view of themselves as experts in response to the positive feedback.
We are in the business of professional development. People come to us already possessing their gender and ethnicity but looking to develop into top notch scientists, teachers or administrators. We need to show that we value the breadth of thought that they bring and how they contribute to the diversity of our collective thinking. If we remember that they are emerging scientists who happen to be minority rather than minority-scientists, we will reinforce the strengths that we hope they will develop rather than simply focus on who they already are.
I’ve presented some opinions on things I believe are important to learning and developing the next generation of plant scientists. I have implied, if not said outright, that it is the important questions, the mysteries, that will attract curious students. I have cautioned that some answers can inhibit thinking (and hinted that the teaching of plant sciences should play to the questions rather than the factoids). I have said that feedback is critical and that knowing your students is particularly important when taking on non-traditional or risky students. I have indicated that we need to put more focus on the training in our graduate programs and worry less about doing it the easy way, selecting those who already possess the qualities. I’ve wondered how we develop skills and also nurture curiosity and creativity, taste and judgment, and the joy of discovery. Finally, I have questioned what we value in diversity and potential consequences of our behaviors. Hopefully I leave you with more questions than answers.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to this group.
If asked about ideas to excite students here are a few listed by Keith Roberts
- Growth and size control at plant and cell level
- Symmetry breaking, cell polarity and cell shaping
- Networking of growth factor signaling pathways
- Cell cycle controls and division plane alignment
- Supra-cellular controls on plant morphology
- Polysaccharide biosynthesis and its control
- Environmental sensing and links with other intracellular signaling pathways
- Long-range signaling
- Pluripotency and somatic embryogenesis
- Control of meristem activity and positional information
I have known four plant scientists who are American Indian. Jack Ridley was a plant physiologist who was at UCDavis in the 70s. Don Ashapanek was a grasslands ecologist at Haskell Indian Nations university into the 90s. Gene Vigil was a cell biologist at USDA until the late 90s. Jane Mt. Pleasant is an agronomist at Cornell. Only Jane is currently active. You need to train more.
If you would like to get a copy of this PowerPoint presentation, please contact Dr. Clifton Poodry at poodryc@nigms.nih.gov or 301-594-3900.