You may have been actively trying to erase all traces of 2016 from your memory, but the CAMB Student Newsletter would like to remind you of the year that just zoomed by. During the annual CAMB holiday celebration this past December, we ambushed students, faculty, and program coordinators and asked them to reflect on their 2016 experiences. From getting married to fellow scientists to exploring space, from curing blindness in dogs to adopting kittens, ‘CAMBers’ had an action-packed year!
The previous year was a year of change and new beginnings for many of us. There were new people. Christina Strathearn joined the CAMB office as the fourth CAMB coordinator. There were new student groups. The CAMB Student Newsletter was launched this year. And as one would expect, there were a lot of new discoveries! Ben Tajer, a fifth year CAMB student, shared a perplexing story of a new zebrafish allele that he isolated in 2016: “How did I get this allele? It looks like the CRISPR could have inserted its own target. Then CRISPR’d the new target. Then inserted its own target again. Then CRISPR’d the new ‘new target’ again...The recursive nature of this series of events reminds me of the movie “Inception”... So I like to call this allele the ‘CRISPception’ allele.”
CAMB students had a lot to say about their research, thesis, and manuscript writing experiences. Some of the more practical interviewees noted that “[publishing] will hopefully guarantee some more funding for the lab.” Payal Jain, a former CAMB PhD student, described her dissertation writing as “[influencing] how you see yourself evolve as a scientist and how you change the way you think about the science that you’re doing and you have already done.”
There were new learning experiences away from the bench as well. Amita Sehgal, a professor from the Genetics Department, reflected on her 2016 sabbatical: “I did a sabbatical for the first time ever and got to experience living in Munich, Germany. I was there at the right time for Oktoberfest and I got to see a couple of good operas.” Some CAMB members chose to explore closer to home. Last year, with a help of his personal microscope, Jon Long, a 2nd year combined degree student in GTV program, actively explored his own backyard in Center City. “I have always known that tardigrades are pretty cool life forms: they can survive in space and I learned that they can also survive in the bark on the trees outside of my apartment in Center City. So I scraped off some of the lichen from the bark, suspended it in water and then found a tardigrade and I filmed it under my microscope.” Others ventured in unexpected directions. “With our eighth grade daughters we did a project where we send out a high altitude balloon that has a camera attached to it, and that balloon goes up to near space, taking photos all the way up from 110,000 feet,” related Steve DiNardo, chair of the Developmental, Stem Cell, and Regenerative Biology program. “When it gets up there, the balloon bursts and then it comes back to earth by a parachute. We have ~300 photos from the entire arc of the flight that are really just stunning.”
According to Dan Kessler, chair of CAMB, moments of discovery and the beauty of science should be actively shared. “My favorite scientific moment of the year was taking frog embryos and microscopes into my daughter’s classroom - she is a freshman in high school. The thing I love most about developmental biology is looking down the microscope and seeing the miracle of embryos, growing and changing and making progress. And to watch a bunch of 9th graders do the same thing and to see the wonder in their faces as they did so - that’s the thing I love about science.”
We encourage you to join the CAMB Newsletter and spread the love of science by sharing more of your stories in 2017!