Pioneers Students visit Genetics Lab at Columbia

On May 20th, the students preparing to interview Harold Varmus visited Franklin Costantini’s genetics lab at Columbia University Medical Center. They worked with grad student Paul Riccio, who led them through a mouse dissection, discussed some of Dr. Varmus’ work and techniques, and fielded questions about life in the lab. [Riccio —in accordance with protocol—terminated a mouse he was using for an experiment and harvested the embryonic kidneys for further analysis.]

Dolkar:

On our visit to the lab at Columbia, we worked with Paul Riccio who demonstrated how scientists can use mice in their research. In this case, he showed how you can make mice glow by inserting a gene from a jellyfish. Scientists believe that they can track the growth of cancer cells with such techniques. It was amazing how it worked. Paul dissected a pregnant mouse and showed us the embryo and different parts. It was pretty interesting to see a mouse being dissected. Going to Columbia has always been an interesting experience for me. Even though I was going regularly for three months for my internship, I like going there anytime. A student can’t learn science just by reading a thick book and not doing any experiments in labs or visiting any labs, because that is an incomplete education. Science is vast and in order to know it well, we must visit labs and see what scientists and researchers do. That way we can learn more and understand better. The more places we go, the more new things we learn. Until this visit, I just heard about scientists, but now I have a new concept of science and I think science is really amazing. It affects each and every individual’s life every day.

Hui Wen:

At the lab at Columbia, we observed a mouse dissection with Paul Riccio. He removed embryos and the kidneys from those little tiny embryos and we looked at them under the microscope. It was really meaningful and useful to explore the mysteries of biology. I thought the best part about the visit was seeing the glowing green kidney displayed on the screen connected to the microscope. It just bloomed like a huge green diamond. Very beautiful and powerful. It is really important for students to visit real science labs. Hands-on work is always better than paper work. We can clearly see each step of a process and understand the purpose by asking questions. Also being at the lab prompted us students to talk about our opinions and shared ideas. This kind of communication makes us more motivated.

Nibh:

The other day we went to Columbia to learn how to dissect mice and to look at embryos and kidneys. It was fun! We looked at different parts of a mouse’s body and saw that it was very similar to humans. I used to think that mice are gross, but now I know that even though they are small, they are very important for scientific experiments.