The CEISMC Gazette

Consider the Lowly Worm...

by Andrew Kerr
March 2007
The Georgia Tech CEISMC Gazette

Over the summer of 2006, Lakeside High School (DeKalb County) biology teacher Annette Parrott got to work with the superstars of biology: nematode worms (which have been given the very lovely Latin species name "elegans"). We chatted about why worms are better than fruit flies, her Bronx background, and creative approaches to teaching high school biology. Fair warning: she also has a wicked sense of humor!

Q - You've done the Georgia Intern-Fellowships for Teachers Program for a long time, now. What years were you involved in that program?

A - 96, 99, 2004, and this most recent one, 2006.

Q - Did you always do biology-related internships?

A - I was always at Georgia Tech. I worked with Terry Snell, Jung Choi, May Wong, and Hang Lu. They were not all biology, but my role in their labs was biology.

This year all I'm teaching is biology. In the past I've done environmental science as well.

Q - Was biology something you were always interested in as a kid?

A - Yes. I come from New York City. I lived in the Bronx. We had a cat, but my brother was allergic, so we had several cats and got rid of them. In fourth grade I convinced my mom to get me a hamster. My mom is a bit more of a traditional mom, and the little animal thing wasn't her alley. That was my thing. So I've always loved the animal part of science.

I was going to be pre-med, and halfway through my junior year in college I realized, "Wait a second! I don't know that I want to be all-consumed by med school." I scrambled at the last minute to figure out what I was going to do, and I decided, "I'll go for my master's in education."

For a long time it felt like teaching was my second choice. But when I graduated with my masters, my mom called me to get all my stuff out of my room (because I was going off on my own) and I found my 8th grade scrapbook, or the memoirs thing, where it says what you want to be when you grow up. And "doctor slash teacher" was written on the line! I felt better because I'm not a person who likes to give up or give in, so knowing that it was always planted there but that I sort of got side-tracked from it was a good thing.

Q - Were you the first member of your family to get an advanced degree?

A - I am the first from my family with a PhD. I'm not the first with a bachelors and I have an aunt who is a teacher in Canada who has a master's.

Q - Still, you're definitely something of a trail-blazer in your family.

A - Yep!

Q - How did you get from the Bronx to Atlanta?

A - I drove.

Q - (Confused silence, then embarrassment.) I deserved that!

A - (Laughing) The first time somebody asked me that I answered very seriously, and I didn't understand the look on their face!

Here it is straight and forward. I grew up in the Bronx in a very West Indian neighborhood (my family is West Indian). At Cardinal Spellman High School there were three groups: African Americans, the Latinos (who were mostly Puerto Rican), and the Caucasions (who were mostly Italian). When I went to college at the University of Buffalo the African American population was like 7%. I did not see people who looked like me. It was kinda rough.

So I wanted to move back to a place where I would see more people that looked like me. However, I didn't necessarily want to go back to New York City because New York City has become like Gotham City to me. It's kinda gray. I love the culture, I love the fact that everything is open 24 hours, I love the MET, I love the Bronx Zoo, but I didn't want to go back to New York City. Atlanta was supposed to be the place where it was happening, the intellectual African American mecca.

And the weather was warm. I had a knee injury. In Buffalo it was really cold, and [the cold weather made the knee] hurt after my knee surgery. So I wanted someplace warm. I had a friend that was down here, and also when I looked at the teaching positions it seemed like the southeast had the greatest need for science teachers. I figured I wouldn't be out of a job.

Q - When was that?

A - 1993, I came down May 28.

Q- Let's talk about these worms. I know you haven't had a chance to use them in the classroom yet--

A - I feel bad! The worms I got from Dr. Lu didn't survive. I got more worms from her, but my school was undergoing an HVAC project, and the temperature was wildly variant. I think that's what killed them. The first few days we were here we had no air. It was very hot in the classroom--some of the teachers had thermometers and they said it was 92 degrees in the classroom! We had kept the worms very cold in the [Georgia Tech] lab, so I think that the heat killed them.

I went back and got more, and those died too! I haven't had the heart to ask her for more! So I ordered some with the school money. But they didn't come when they were supposed to. I kept inquiring, "Where are my worms where are my worms where are my worms?" I think when they came they got lost. So I got some more worms, and they didn't come when I expected either, and by the time I got them I was no longer even near nematodes. In fact they're sitting right here on my computer--I haven't even opened them! I knew that at that point it was too late for me to go back!

Q - Why are these worms just so totally awesome for scientists to work with?

A - Now that we've cracked the human genome we're finding that there's a lot of homology between genes. So we've got a gene that does something; other organisms have a gene that does something very similar [for more on this please read my interview with Dr. Todd Steelman--ed]. Some of the things that they're researching with these nematodes are obesity genes, age genes, things that we have found in these worms that, if we can find homologs in humans, then the sky is the limit with what we can do with that information.

Q - Why do scientists work with nematode worms instead of people?

A - The human genome is too large, and there are a lot more ethical considerations in tinkering with human genetics and using that for research. Also, life cycle. The worm goes through its life cycle in two to four weeks, whereas we're talking 20 to 40 years for a human to go through a generation. And it's a whole lot cheaper to feed them, too!

Q - What do nematode worms eat?

A - They eat E. coli. But E. coli comes in a whole bunch of different strains, so it's not like any old E. coli, it's a particular strain that they like to eat.

They've sent them into space, too!

Q- Those worms have gotten around!

A - Yes they have.

Q - Are these worms all around us?

A - They are found commonly in the soil with several other types of worms as well.

Q - Are they related to earthworms?

A - Oh no, earthworms are in the phylum Annelida, they are segmented worms. These are in the phylum Nematoda, these are roundworms.

Q - Seems anything "wormy" in appearance gets branded a "worm," regardless of their actual relationships to one another.

A - That is correct. These are related to hook worms and pin worms and heart worms like your dog would get. Those are much much larger than what these are. Those are parasitic and these are free-living.

Q - So say this nematode thing had actually worked out, what would you have done with them in your classroom?

A - I was going to use them the second day of school because they have a very quick reproductive cycle. On the first day they came in they were going to look and see only five to seven worms on the slide, and there would be a bacterial line on the slide, so they would see the bacteria and there would be a few tracks, because as the worms crawl they leave little tracks. Then there was going to be an exponential population growth. They would lay eggs, and once the eggs started hatching, and those babies had babies, and all of this, the students would be able to observe. I figured I could do it in eight days.

And they would have to tell me what is it, what are they looking at, is it alive, is it not alive, how do you know it's alive, and things like that. So it was going to be my intro to biology.

My AP class does a genetics of Drosophila lab. Drosophila are fruit flies, and I hate fruit flies because they fly away, and then you have fruit flies in your classroom, and they live there--I've been through this! So I'm like..."Worms!" We could do genetics with worms because they come in various strains, and they'd be cooler because they wouldn't fly away and get in all your food in the classroom. And right now we're talking about the diversity of animal phyla. Here would be a nematode that they could actually see and that they would have had experience with and could have more experience with. There's also a way to collect them in the wild, so I was hoping to collect some wild ones and compare them to the ones that the scientists use.

Q - I wonder if the wild ones would beat up the lab strains?

A - We did a pond lab where I just took some pond water; they came up with some nematodes in the pond water. There's another lab we do where we get lichen off of trees, because there's a "water bear" that likes to live in lichen, and that's another place where you'll get a lot of nematodes, when you look for the water bears.

Q - I noticed on your personal website that you write poetry, and that it seems to be religious-themed.

A - Since 2002 it has been. That's when it became personal. I'd been brought up in a very fundamentalist Christian church, but it was not really a personal experience, it was just part of my upbringing.

Q - I talked with a Georgia Tech professor recently about the perceived divide between religion and science, and how that's just not necessary.

A - When I start the school year we talk about what is science, and what are the "rules of science," and what is the purpose of science. That's the only definition I give them that they have to memorize for the school year, the definition of science, which I say is "the process of finding answers to questions about the world around them." It's a verb, it's a process, it's something we do.

In order for it to be science, it has to be testable and retestable. When it comes to issues of faith and God, God is, at this point, not testable, nor are a lot of supernatural experiences or paranormal experiences. They're not testable in a way that's reliably retestable, which means if I test, you test, he tests it, she tests it, this week, next week, next month, we would get the same data each time.

But I try and show them that science doesn't mean that you don't believe in God. A scientist can have their own personal belief, it can be theistic, atheistic, agnostic, but science can't have a say at this point on the existence of God, or supernatural or paranormal experiences. When we get to evolution, I tell my kids we're learning about evolution, not "evil-lution"!

They confuse the difference between what creationists actually are and say. They think that creationists are these people who are religious fundamentalists and they just believe what they believe because they believe it. No-no-no-no, creationists actually take the same evidence that evolutionists take, they look at the fossil record, they look at the stratification in the Grand Canyon. However, they interpret it differently.

One of the examples I give in class is that the evolutionists say that the strata show that these are different eras that have been in existence over time. But the creationists will say, "Look, if you take a jar of water and throw in a handful of gravel a handful of dirt, a handful of leaves, shake it up and set it down, it will also rest in layers. So the layering doesn't necessarily mean that this was something that happened over periods of time--it could mean a great flood came and when the water left everything was left in layers." So that's one thing I try to show them.

The other is that they're both looking for the same end, to get answers to questions. That's it.

The very first year we did GIFT, Dr. Roger Wartell used to hold weekly meetings in the biology department. We got a book by Robert Shapiro, A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth. It starts out in the prologue with this man going up to a religious man on the top of a Tibetan mountain to find out the origin of life. And each day the holy man tells him a different story. Each story is one of the origin of life stories. For example, one day he tells him about spontaneous generation, the next day he tells him about panspermia, the next day he tells them the creation story, the next day he tells him about Father Raven--all of these are stories that talk about how life began on the earth. What's interesting is a lot of these theories, with the exception of Father Raven and spontaneous generation, currently have researchers who are researching in these areas. And what really impressed me--this has opened up a whole new world for me--I did not know that Francis Crick of Watson and Crick, the DNA guy, believed in panspermia! Which is a theory that life on this planet originated from outer space! It's really starting to pick up speed. If you do a search for "astrobiology," there are high school courses now on astrobiology, the textbooks have astrobiology in them, and that was not the case ten years ago. I was like "What? Crick?" You don't think about Crick being a crackpot. I started looking into this and there is so much information out there that's not mainstream. So I bring this into the classroom and watch the students' eyes go wide, and we have debates sometimes. But these are legitimate people who are believing this. We go back to the heliocentric versus the geocentric view of our solar system, and whether the sun revolved around the earth or the earth revolved around the sun, and we just talk about how scientists at the cusps of paradigm shifts were always thought to be crackpots. But if you wait a couple hundred years you find out, "Wow, we thought they were crazy, but they were just visionaries."

Q - It seems though that one thing Christian fundamentalists and evolutionists might actually agree on is that, for example, Christian fundamentalists would argue that the Father Raven creation story doesn't really deserve to be compared to Christianity as an equal sparring partner with Christianity; and evolutionists would argue that there are theories that don't really qualify as equal competitors to theirs, in terms of the amount of evidence for those theories. Do you feel that all of these theories have equal merit, or do you try to suggest that some theories may be more viable than others?

A - Well what we actually do with the theories...now Father Raven is tough because there isn't a lot of experimentation or even geological or scientific evidence that supports that. But there's the story of clay and all the other things that people are actually researching that there is a lot of support for. What I do is I assign the students a theory, each on a different day, and they need to come in that day and that day they "believe" it, and it's their job to convince the rest of us that they're right!

Q - That sounds like a lot of fun!

A - Some years it's been very fun when they see what I'm doing. They buy into it at least for that day and they realize, "I'm not asking you to change what you think, I just want you to present a convincing argument today."

Q - It's very educational in that it teaches kids to be very critical about anybody they see on TV, whether it's in relation to this, or politics, or whatever.

A - That's exactly correct, and I did that a lot more when I had environmental science. I always say you've got to consider the source. You can't just believe it because somebody said it. Does that line up with all that you've heard before? Go out and find some evidence for yourself!

As far as the question you asked me, the evolutionists, the creationists use a lot of the same evidence but interpret it differently, and that's where you get into the fallibility of man, because science has been wrong before.

Pluto is the perfect example. We've been teaching our kids that there were nine planets; now we've got to come up with something new because they figured, well, "we probably didn't do a really good job when we classified Pluto as a planet."

And that comes as a shock to students, because they think that science is very static, and that once it's a fact, once it's proven, then that's it, it's all over. I try to let them know that in actuality you can't prove anything, you can only disprove something. You can find as many things to support it, but you never know when the next thing you find is going to disprove it. And so you can only find supporting evidence, but you can't prove anything.

I like to have fun in the classroom, I like to cause "cognitive uproar," because if they're thinking about it then I feel my job is done!

Q - I think there's too much fear of introducing controversy into the classroom. That's a real missed opportunity, because controversy is precisely the sort of thing that fires students up, gets them excited and passionate!

A - We talk about wanting them to be critical thinkers. But they're not thinking. I'm hoping that the way the GPS's have been presented is to get them to think. I don't know if that's really showing up in the tests because the test is still a little trivia contest. But I want them to think. Yes, I want them to pass the End of Course Test, I want them to pass the Georgia High School Test, but beyond that is life. And although I'm a biology teacher, we live biology every day. More important to me is that they are critical thinkers who will analyze all of the data in all of their circumstances--even in their personal life! Whether they think this man or woman is good for them, there's data for that! Whatever there is there's something they should be looking at and coming to a conclusion based on their observations, which is science.

Q - It's funny you mention that. I interviewed a very cool professor at Georgia Tech named Julia Kubanek, and she mentioned how the scientific method spills over from her job as a biologist into her personal life as well; it's just a very good way of approaching life's problems.

A - Agreed!