“The idea of MCB 100 is to create a large research group equivalent in size to a senior faculty’s research group, staffed entirely by undergraduates,” says Executive Director of Undergraduate Education in MCB, Robert Lue. “It’s outfitted exactly like a senior researcher’s lab.”

“It’s more than a course, it’s part of a program,” he adds.

Lila K. Gollogly ’04, a student in the course, adds that it feels “just like an internship,” not like a standard course.

Likewise, Alain Viel, coursehead for MCB 100, says that working with original research will introduce students to more sophisticated ways of conducting experiments.

“It’s not just pipetting all day long,” Viel says. “You think more about the method and the elegance of the method.”

Mitosis

While psychology and biological anthropology students have played in Professor of Psychology Marc Hauser’s Monkey labs for a number of years now, this is an unusual development in either biology or chemistry departments, according to Lue.

MCB 100 is acting as a pilot, hoping to train students in basic research techniques and to give them unusual access to high-tech labs. In addition, the students can receive the kind of mentoring that they wouldn’t get from working alone in a professor’s lab. One graduate student advises each project, and all the students report to both Viel and their respective professor .

This comes at no small cost. Losick and Lue have jointly funded the course with two grants from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), which cover the $300,000 worth of equipment in three laboratories. Aside from the standard rows of pipettes, beakers and microscopes, the facility houses a gene gun, an RTS ProteoMaster and high-tech imaging systems.

Moreover, Losick and Lue approached Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) William C. Kirby and Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 last year for further funding. Matching FAS grants will go towards a renovation of the 5th floor biological labs, to allow more space next year.

Lue and Viel plan to repeat the course in each semester, with new projects each term. Viel says that the renovated laboratory could hold about 30 students each semester as well.

Over 50 students applied for the 15 spots in the program this spring, causing the group to expand to 18 to accommodate graduating seniors.

Viel says that future MCB research seminars will enroll fewer seniors, leaving more room for first-years and sophomores to begin serious research, and moving up the “steep learning curve.”

Viel hopes that MCB 100 will build a bridge in the curriculum between taking introductory science labs and signing up for a professor’s original projects.

“The idea is that this is a lab that we want to be as similar as possible to a real research lab,” Losick says. “One of our hopes was that sophomores would use this a stepping-stone to joining a research lab,” he said, adding that this might eventually create a “sustained relationship” between a student and professor, possibly leading to a thesis. Losick says that he tries to take on undergraduates each year, but that space constraints have limited the number he can handle.