Giving Grad School a Whirl, by Angela Spivey -- Endeavors, Fall 1999

Why should top students choose graduate school? Meet two people who spent the summer finding out.

Giving Grad School a Whirl
by Angela Spivey

A dose of light

Natasha Jacobs positions a plate of cells in a UV chamber. When she closes the door and pushes a button, she'll be exposing the cells to a strong burst of ultraviolet light. Eight joules per meter squared, to be exact. A huge dose.

Jacobs, a senior biology and chemistry major at UNC-Pembroke, is getting a huge dose of her own this summer, doing research in Marila Cordeiro-Stone's pathology lab at Carolina. "I've learned a lot this summer," Jacobs says. "Some of the things that we're doing in the lab, I've never been directly exposed to before."

As part of the Summer Pregraduate Research Experience program, Jacobs works with Cordeiro-Stone as her mentor. "In this lab," Jacobs says, "they're more than willing to teach me something new. I've always loved the sciences, but I wasn't sure whether graduate school was something I wanted to do. But now they're swaying me—I'm thinking that is what I want to do."

As part of her work, Jacobs tests the effects of UV-induced DNA damage on normal cells and XP variant cells. XP stands for xeroderma pigmentosum, a rare inherited disorder characterized by defects in the mechanism that repairs DNA damage that normally occurs from exposure to UV light. Those with the disorder have a high incidence of skin and eye cancers. Because any UV exposure at all can irreparably damage their DNA, they must avoid daylight and wear protective clothing when they do go out during the day.

When human cells are damaged by UV light, DNA replication (when DNA makes a copy of itself ) is inhibited. Cordeiro-Stone's lab is looking for proteins that participate in this inhibition. In the variant group of XP, this inhibition is enhanced because of the absence of an enzyme that participates in the replication of UV-damaged DNA. In addition to irradiating cells, Jacobs has also learned Western blotting, a test used to detect certain proteins. She's using the test to follow changes in cellular proteins after UV radiation.

Though the procedures aren't too difficult to learn, knowing when to use them takes patience. "You have to think ahead, and not everything is going to turn out the way you want it to," Jacobs says. "It's not something that's just going to give you a straightforward answer. We know that's not how our body works."

Reading Bones

The human hand contains 27 bones. Randy Townsend is learning how to identify each one.

"Every anthropologist has a little trick," Townsend says. Holding a bone a certain way, looking at it from the left instead of the right.

Townsend, a senior anthropology major at Carolina, wants to become a forensic anthropologist—the person who takes on the delicate job of identifying someone from their remains, or determining how a person died. "I want to go into a situation and reconstruct what happened, and how it happened," he says.

Townsend has been working on such skills as identifying ethnicity or sex by measuring and examining remains. For example, the size of certain bones connected to the jaw, the prominence of muscle markings, and the size of a groove on the pelvic bone can all be clues to sex, he says.

But he has a lot more to learn. "There are certain things you can get good at, but you never quite perfect it," he says. "You can only get better at it."

As a student in the Summer Pregraduate Research Experience program, Townsend has worked with Clark Larsen, professor of anthropology, studying human remains. That's just the kind of experience Townsend needs to achieve his goal of earning a Ph.D. in biological anthropology. The work has also helped him learn about the cultural side of the field. Remains not only leave clues about how people died—they can also tell us how they lived.

Larsen studies the toll that life takes on people's bones. Examining the skeleton can tell you, for instance, what people have been eating—and whether it was good for them. Larsen has found that agriculture, while often thought of as an improvement, has had serious side effects. Remains of populations that made the switch to agriculture show a consistent increase in dental defects and iron deficiency.

"Foraging gave people a well-balanced diet," Townsend says. "With agriculture there was a lot more dependence on stable crops, like corn. But that's insufficient as far as nutrients, especially iron."

Townsend has studied how this deficiency contributed to porotic hyperostosis, in which bone cannibalizes itself to create red blood cells. The resulting lesions cause part of the cranium to expand. "The skull looks deformed," Townsend says. "This isn't something that occurred overnight. It took a long time for the skull to get to that point."

It'll also take a while for Townsend to learn how to decipher all the bones in the body. But he's ready for the task. "Every day that I go into the lab," he says, "I learn something new."

Attracting Talent

Students from all over the country and a wide range of disciplines come to Carolina each summer to conduct research under the direction of a Carolina faculty member through the Summer Pregraduate Research Experience (SPGRE) program. Sponsored by the School of Education, SPGRE is designed to get minority college students interested in graduate study. It's one effort to address the disproportionately low number of African Americans, American Indians, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans getting doctoral degrees and becoming professors nationwide.

"These bright, academically talented students are being wooed by professional schools such as medicine and law, and by the corporate sector," says Henry T. Frierson Jr., SPGRE director, professor of educational psychology, and director of the Research Education Support Program. "Business, law, and medicine are already strong draws in most minority communities. This is not yet true for advanced graduate studies."

Over the last six years, more than 70 percent of SPGRE students have gone on to pursue master's or doctoral degrees. This summer, 49 students participated in the program.