Ed Smith knows the power of having footsteps to follow. Six of his older brothers earned PhDs, he says, and observing their experiences helped him set his course. “It was important to me to learn from them,” he says. “If you have a good role model, you’ll be able to follow their paths, and you don’t make the same mistakes.” 

As a professor, Smith has dedicated tremendous effort to providing that kind of support to undergraduate and graduate students in genetics and biomedical programs, particularly those from historically excluded and underrepresented groups. For his work, Smith is the recipient of the 2021 Genetics Society of America Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education, in recognition of his highly successful mentoring programs at Virginia Tech.

Growing up in Sierra Leone, West Africa, Smith recalls getting up at 5 a.m. to work on the farm with his father. From a young age, he associated early rising with physical labor, and expected that earning a graduate degree meant the end of pre-dawn wake-ups. But even now, he starts his day early, relishing the brief peace to get some uninterrupted work time before the daily bustle begins.

“I always thought education took that away, that if you get a PhD there’s no need to get up at 5 o’clock to work,” he says with a laugh. “My postdoc mentor, Susan Lamont, taught me that just like those farmers, you have to get up early if you want to do a lot.”

For his first faculty position, Smith went to Tuskegee University, where he was instrumental in bringing a comparative animal genomics program to the university. “I had never heard of HBCUs,” he says. “I really liked it. Since I didn’t go back to Sierra Leone, this was an opportunity to join an institution that represents my background.”

While at Tuskegee, Smith worked with colleagues at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Auburn University, Research Genetics (now Hudson Alpha Institute) and Alabama A&M to organize a biotechnology and genomics summer learning program for K-12 students and teachers. He spent 8 years at Tuskegee before moving to Virginia Tech in 2000, where he would have the opportunity to train PhD students and advance his research program in poultry genetics and genomics in the Department of Animal and Poultry Sciences. 

At Virginia Tech, Smith played key roles in sequencing the turkey genome and initiated two NIH-funded training programs: the Initiative for Maximizing Student Development (IMSD) and the Post-Baccalaureate Research and Education Program (PREP). The two programs have provided research and training opportunities to dozens of students from underrepresented groups who are pursuing careers in science.

“I was in the first cohort of IMSD students that were brought into Virginia Tech,” says Anjolii Diaz, now an Associate Professor of psychological science at Ball State University. “It was one of the best things that has ever happened to me.”

The programs give students the chance to conduct research and present their results at meetings, but perhaps more importantly, they form a supportive community for students who may be the first in their families to pursue STEM careers. “Our emphasis has always been, if you come, we are a family,” Smith says. “We do a lot of eating together, and we have a lot of interaction so you don’t fall off.” He recalls how his own graduate school advisor, Tom Savage at Oregon State University, used to invite students to come for Thanksgiving dinner. That experience of sharing food created a strong sense of belonging, and Smith says it has shaped his own mentoring philosophy.

“Dr. Smith was always more than just an advisor, he really was a mentor, because he would advocate for each and every one of us,” recalls Diaz. “He was someone that we would always be able to turn to if we were experiencing barriers that we didn’t know how to maneuver.”

IMSD includes both undergraduate and graduate students at Virginia Tech. 85 percent of the program’s grad students completed their doctorate degrees, and 70 percent of the undergraduates went on to PhD programs at schools such as Brown, Yale, and Stanford.

Similarly, PREP recruits students who may not have had research opportunities at their undergraduate institution and prepares them to apply to competitive graduate programs in biological sciences. 88% of PREP participants have been accepted into PhD programs.

After going through the programs, the students go on to form a network of colleagues and friends across institutions. Having a connection with other scientists from historically excluded groups can feel like a breath of fresh air, says Margaret Werner-Washburne, Regents’ Professor Emerita of Biology at the University of New Mexico, who nominated Smith for the award. She recalls the first time she met Smith, as members of an NHGRI study section. 

“It’s lonely,” she says. “I’d go to these big meetings, and usually I’m the only Hispanic and the only minority.” Meeting Smith, she says, was like running across a long-lost sibling. The two have kept in touch over the years, and she’s been pleased to see the fruits of Smith’s mentoring programs.

“I had a student who was capable, but his self-esteem was not great,” says Werner-Washburne. “I got him to apply to Ed’s program, and it was miraculous to see the turnaround.” 

Part of the programs’ impact comes from the amount of personal effort Smith puts in for each student, says Werner-Washburne. 

“A lot of what we have done in terms of minority student development has been to help students see that the magic is inside them,” she says. “Ed Smith is single-handedly transforming science by opening the door to so many students who now feel they are a part of the scientific enterprise, that they belong.”

Smith will accept the award and present an Award Seminar online on Wednesday, May 5, at 1-2 p.m. EDT on “Culturally Aware Research Education: Pay Attention to the Differences”. Register at the button below.

Register for Award Seminar

The Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education recognizes individuals or groups who have had significant, sustained impact on genetics education at any level, from K-12 through graduate school and beyond. The award was named posthumously for Elizabeth W. Jones (1939-2008), who was the recipient of the first GSA Excellence in Education Award in 2007. She was a renowned geneticist and educator who served as GSA president (1987) and as Editor in Chief of GENETICS for nearly 12 years. 

After giving a talk in Seattle about chromosome pairing, Chao-ting (Ting) Wu boarded the redeye flight back to Boston and settled in to read a new research paper on an odd new discovery in the human genome. “It was so exciting, I had to get up and walk around on the plane,” she says. “I could not stay in my seat.”

The paper that had Wu pacing the aisle that day was the first report describing DNA sequences called ultraconserved elements (UCEs), from Gill Bejerano in David Haussler’s group at UC Santa Cruz. UCEs are nucleotide sequences more than 200 nucleotides long that are identical in the human, rat, and mouse genomes. It’s incredibly unlikely that a sequence that long could remain unchanged over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, and yet Bejerano reported finding 481 of them.

“I remember reading it and thinking, how can that be?” Wu says. “How could we have missed this? How can something be so important and so hidden?”

Intrigued, Wu began studying UCEs in her own lab. “They are considered by some to be the longest-standing mystery of the genome era,” she says. “We don’t have an explanation for why any genome would retain even one sequence that long. The reason my lab studies it is this: pairing could be a very simple explanation.”

Wu has spent decades studying how homologous chromosomes pair up. Once considered a quirk of Drosophila’s genome, the idea that chromosomes communicate by coming into contact with each other is now being studied in mammals, fungi, and even plants. “It’s moved from being an ‘artifact’ to possibly being a universal way in which homologous chromosomes can communicate,” Wu says. “That’s been extremely exciting to see.”

Wu’s studies began when she was a graduate student with William Gelbart, who was a professor at Harvard University and a previous awardee of the George W. Beadle Award, and continued in her own laboratory with Jim Morris, a graduate student and now a professor at Brandeis University, and Pam Geyer, a professor at the University of Iowa. These studies focused on transvection, in which gene expression can be regulated by interactions between homologous alleles on different chromosomes. If the basis of UCEs is pairing, she speculates, that could explain why the sequences cannot tolerate changes.

This model aligns two otherwise incongruous observations. First, she and Adnan Derti, a graduate student and now at Auron Therapeutics, discovered that copy number variation of a UCE – a deletion or duplication – is rarely found in healthy individuals. On the other hand, other groups found that some UCEs can be deleted from both chromosomes without causing lethality in mice. The pairing model, however, predicts exactly such outcomes for UCEs whose function is to pair.

Perhaps these perfectly conserved regions act as “guardians of the genome,” she speculates, helping preserve the integrity of the full set of chromosomes. Understanding them could ultimately provide protection from disease.

“She’s always thinking about the weird and the wonderful, and what are the things we have no idea about,” says Jack Bateman, a former postdoc who studied transvection and now heads his own lab at Bowdoin College. “She’s so fun to talk to because she just has these ideas that are different.”

In addition to her work as professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, she directs the Consortium for Space Genetics and the Personal Genetics Education Project (pgEd), a public engagement program intended to empower citizens to educate themselves about the genomic technologies that pervade our modern society. This team of scientists, social scientists, educators, and community organizers work with schools, teachers, policymakers, filmmakers, communities of faith, and other groups to prompt conversations about the benefits and ethical and social implications of genetics.

For all of these diverse contributions, Ting Wu has been awarded the 2021 George W. Beadle Award from the Genetics Society of America, which recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the community of genetics researchers beyond an exemplary research career. 

“She’s so passionate about things,” says Pamela Geyer, professor of biochemistry at the University of Iowa, one of the scientists who nominated Wu for the award. “She pushes you to think about things in a different way.”

At some point thinking becomes experimenting, and, eventually, time came to get a good look at the chromosomes, themselves. Thanks to work done in Wu’s lab, geneticists have powerful tools to visualize the 3D shapes of chromosomes and trace the dynamic system as they interact.

This story begins with Ben Williams, a graduate student and now with Helmsley Charitable Trust, whose idea for Oligopaints was demonstrated and then advanced by Brian Beliveau, a graduate student and now an assistant professor at the University of Washington,­ and Eric Joyce, a postdoctoral fellow and now an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Oligopaints are low-cost fluorescent probes that hybridize to specific locations along the chromosomes and, led by Beliveau, the Wu group and her collaborators, Peng Yin and Xiaowei Zhuang, professors at Harvard Medcial School and Harvard University, respectively, enabled Oligopaints to image chromosomes in super-resolution. “It’s been very exciting,” says Wu. “The super-resolution structures are giving us true measurements of distance, volume, and shape, and we are now looking at greater and greater expanses of the genome. We’re seeing how completely dynamic the genome can be.” 

The infectious enthusiasm that has propelled her lab into uncharted scientific waters has also spilled over into the realm of education. The advent of home genetic testing and personal genomics sparked lots of probing conversations among her lab members about communicating with the public about the social and ethical considerations around advances in genetics.

“Have we communicated enough with everybody, non-scientists, about genetics?” Wu muses. “So that when these technologies come out, they are informed enough to make decisions for themselves about whether they want to use those technologies?”

To learn what questions were percolating through the community, she and her husband, geneticist George Church, and their daughter, Marie, took a road trip across the country to talk to people who had volunteered their DNA for the Personal Genome Project. “These were people from all walks of life,” Wu says. “We came back so much more enriched by their conversations and so much more knowledgeable about the challenges that we had to address.”

That trip sparked her to co-found the Personal Genetics Education Project, or pgEd, with Bateman and Dana Waring, who is the Education Director. The program started by visiting local high schools and making presentations in biology classrooms. Realizing that they wouldn’t get too far just visiting individual schools, the team began publishing curriculum and teacher training materials to spread genetics education into more classrooms, particularly those where students might not have a strong background in genetics or biology. But Wu emphasizes that the goal isn’t to teach the nuts and bolts of DNA, or recruit students into STEM careers. Rather, she says, pgEd seeks to spark curiosity and debate, such that when students encounter genetic technology in their lives, they feel qualified to ask questions. 

“We’re not talking about what DNA bases are,” she says. “We’re talking about interesting things people might want to know to help them navigate their lives. When people are interested, they start asking questions. We’re hoping that when a physician comes along and says, ‘we’re going to do this DNA test,’ they aren’t silent, thinking, ‘oh, this person knows a lot more than I do.’ Instead, they will feel confident enough to ask questions, and I think that is the greatest protection you can give somebody. Laws are helpful, but one-on-one in a doctor’s office, you need the confidence that you can hold your own in a conversation about genetics. That’s what we’re going for.”

pgEd, whose activities are coordinated by Marnie Gelbart, Director of Programs, has spread well beyond schools into TV and film, congressional briefings, and faith communities. Recently, Gelbart, Robin Bowman (Professional Development Associate), and Nadine Vincentin (Research Fellow) worked on the public engagement programming and educational resources that accompanied the Ken Burns PBS documentary “The Gene: An Intimate History.” They have also been working closely with The Learning Center for the Deaf on lessons and curricula in American Sign Language, with Mohammed Hannan (Community Liaison) extending their engagement within communities. “It’s been amazing to see it grow,” says Bateman. “They’ve done so many things. They’ve done congressional briefings. How do these things happen? They happen because it’s Ting.”

The George W. Beadle Award honors individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the community of genetics researchers. Wu will accept the award at the 62^nd Annual Drosophila Research Conference (#Dros21) and will present an Award Seminar online on April 29^th from 1-2 pm EDT.

Interested in learning about public engagement from pgEd? GSA has partnered with pgEd for a program on inclusive public engagement for geneticists. Sign up now for the “Discussing Genetics” webinar series and join us for additional training workshops coming soon. 

The Genetics Society of America (GSA) and the Personal Genetics Education Project (pgEd) of Harvard Medical School announce a new partnership to build public dialogue about genetic technologies. Their joint program aims to better equip scientists to engage in discussions about genetics with all communities, with special emphasis on those who have been marginalized, economically disadvantaged, or otherwise excluded from conversations about science.

“In this time of reckoning with racial injustice and health inequality, geneticists have a responsibility to engage with the public on the ethical and social dimensions of their work. Indeed, many of our members want to take part in these efforts, but they are unsure of how best to do so,” says GSA’s Executive Director, Tracey DePellegrin. “We are thrilled that pgEd is offering its guidance and experience to help our researchers achieve more inclusive education and public engagement.”

Genetic technologies are transforming healthcare and society. A person may seek out genetic testing to inform their medical care or fertility treatment; or to explore their ancestry. They may encounter issues related to genetics during interactions with law enforcement, criminal justice, and immigration authorities; or when voting on proposed uses of genetic technologies (for example, to address vector-borne disease). There is a need for scientists to work with communities so people are equipped with the information they want about genetics. And science, too, benefits from the experiences and perspectives of the communities we serve.

The new partnership responds to this need by mobilizing scientists to engage in two-way conversations with the public on the benefits and ethical, legal, and social implications of genetics. It also aims to help researchers better understand the experiences and perspectives of a diverse range of stakeholders and how they are affected by genetic research and technology. “In pgEd’s travels, we have shared what is happening in genetics with countless communities. And what we have learned from the people we’ve met could fill volumes. Our team is eager for the opportunity to share our experiences with the GSA and to learn from the work of others in the genetics community.” said pgEd Director of Programs and geneticist, Marnie Gelbart.

The program will launch with a series of online workshops for scientists to increase their awareness of the ethical and social dimensions of genetics and build skills for public engagement. These events will explore topics from the pgEd curriculum, such as precision medicine, genome editing and the environment, and the history of eugenics. pgEd will share approaches for illustrating how genetics has propelled new medical treatments and welcoming many viewpoints on the use of new technologies, such as CRISPR. Interactive discussions will address pgEd’s experiences engaging with a range of communities and will include guests from pgEd’s community partnerships.

GSA and pgEd aim also to build public engagement internship and fellowship programs. These offerings will be shaped by input from workshop participants and each component will center around creating ways for scientists to engage meaningfully with their communities — whether personal or professional.

This initiative will build upon the strengths of the two partner organizations. Since 2006, the pgEd team has been talking with people from many walks of life about genetics through a respectful, inclusive, and non-advocacy approach. Along with their expertise in creating online curricula (including 11 lessons that accompany the 2020 PBS documentary, The Gene: An Intimate History), pgEd will draw on their breadth of programs—including a series of six Congressional briefings in Washington, DC, training thousands of teachers, partnering with communities of faith, and working with creators of television and film.

Founded in 1931, GSA is a scientific membership society for researchers and educators in the field of genetics. Using the tools of genetics and genomics, nearly 6,000 GSA members from more than 50 countries around the world investigate a wide variety of biological questions and applications. Partnering with pgEd will help GSA scientists to build bridges between the research community and public groups—particularly those who normally feel excluded from scientific discussions.

This project will launch at 12:00 p.m. EST, December 8, 2020, with an online event titled “Meeting the Moment: How can scientists contribute to a broad conversation on genetics and society?” Participants will:

• Learn about pgEd’s approach to engaging with communities and addressing controversial and/or sensitive topics such as reproductive genetic testing, eugenics, DNA testing in law enforcement, race and ancestry, and genome editing and the environment;
• Discuss common challenges and barriers in communicating about the scientific, ethical, and social dimensions of genetics;
• Help shape the topics and goals of the 2021 workshop series and future initiatives by providing input and asking questions.

Speakers:

• Denise Montell, GSA President
• Ting Wu, pgEd Director and Co-founder
• Marnie Gelbart, pgEd Director of Programs

All members of the GSA community are invited to participate by registering at the link below.

Register Now

About GSA:

The Genetics Society of America serves an international community of more than 5,000 scientists who use genetics to make new discoveries and improve lives. GSA advances the field through conferences, the journals GENETICS and G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics, advocacy, professional development programs, and more.

About pgEd:

Founded in 2006 in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, pgEd is a team of scientists, social scientists, educators, and community organizers, who talk with people about genetics in every way that it touches our lives – from health to the workplace and from the environment to the criminal justice system.

From April 22–25, TAGC 2020 Online brought scientists from multiple research communities together to share their research and stay connected. Videos from select TAGC cross-community sessions are now available on YouTube. Those who weren’t able to participate in the conference in April, check out the recordings below!

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Speakers:

• Scott Barolo, University of Michigan Medical School: Inclusive PhD Admissions
• Andrea Darby, Cornell University: The Diversity Preview Weekend
• Gary McDowell, Lightoller LLC: World’s for Diversity and Inclusion
• Jennifer Alexander, Fox Chase Cancer Center: The Inclusion of Dietary Practices in Genetics Research
• Crystal Tsosie, Turtle Mountain Community College: Building an Indigenous Bio Bank

Genetic Technology in Practice

Speakers:

• Kenneth Bruno, Zymergen Inc.: Fungal Genetics and Automated Strain Engineering
• Eli Rodgers-Melnick, Corteva Agriscience: Making the Most of our Molecules
• Celia Payne, Dupont: Development of Robust Yeast Strains for the Corn-Ethanol Industry
• Julia Alterman, Atalanta Therapeutics: Divalent siRNA Scaffold for Robust Gene Modulation in the Central Nervous System
• Janis Weeks, InVivo Biosystems: Cutting Edge Genome Editing and Phenotyping Tools

COVID-19 Response from the NSF and NIH (Q&A)

NSF Speakers:

• Joanne Tornow, Assistant Director Biological Services
• Matt Olson, Program Director, Division of Environmental Biology
• Manju Hingorani, Program Director, Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences

NIH Speakers:

• Michael Lauer, Director, Office of Extramural Research
• Jodi Black, Deputy Director, Office of Extramural Research

Education

Speakers:

• Julie Hall, Lincoln Memorial University: The Impact of Collaborative Instruction on Molecular Genetics and Mammalogy Students
• Rochelle Tractenberg, Georgetown University: Promoting Learning and Learner-Centered Teaching of Genetics and Bioinformatics
• Jason Williams, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory: The Genomics Education Alliance: Scalable, Sustainable Infrastructure for CUREs
• Rebecca Burgess, Stevenson University: Crowd-Sourcing CRISPR to Investigate the Impact of Chromatin Environment on Double-Strand Break Repair
• Teresa Lee, Emory University: The Pipeline CURE: A Curriculum Wide-Approach to Introduce Students to Research
• Luke Ziegler, North Hennepin Community College: Performance Enhanced Biology

Direct Collaborations: Model Organism Researchers and Clinicians

Speakers:

• Ada Hamosh, Johns Hopkins University: The Essential Role of Model Organisms for Functional Studies of Genes and Variants Linked to Human Diseases: Part 1, Part 2
• Hugo Bellen, Baylor College of Medicine, Solving Difficult to Diagnose Diseases using Flies and Zebrafish
• Philip Hieter, University of British Columbia: The Canadian National Network of Clinician and Model Scientists: Rare Diseases: Models and Mechanisms
• Lauryl Nutter, The Center for Phenogenomics: Leveraging the IMPC in Collaborative Research
• Andy Golden, Laboratory of Biochemistry and Genetics: Modeling Rare and Neglected Human Diseased in C.elegans
• Alex Parker, University of Montreal: A Model Organism-based Drug Discovery Pipeline for ALS
• Shinya Yamamoto, Baylor College of Medicine: Strategies and Resources to Facilitate Collaborations between Clinicians and Model Organism Researchers on a Global Scale

Guest author Rori Rohlfs describes a unique classroom project for exploring the eugenic history of our field.

I was a fourth-year graduate student when I found myself asking a librarian for the archives of the journal The Annals of Eugenics. I got to that point by climbing back through a chain of references on fundamental statistical measures in my field of population genetics. I held the journal and flipped through the article titles and familiar author names, realizing that my field wasn’t so far removed from the turn-of-the-century eugenics movement. Feeling somewhat nauseous, I photocopied the article I was looking for and returned the journal quickly.

Now as a faculty member at San Francisco State University (SFSU), a public institution that puts social justice at the center of its mission, I continue to struggle with my field’s limited reckoning with our eugenic past. Can folks like me, who have built careers that grow from eugenics science, hold ourselves accountable for these roots as we continue scientific research? These questions become increasingly important in a political landscape where scientific ideas about genetic variation and difference are weaponized to support devastating policies, and the atrocities of racial injustice are staring us in the face.

As unarmed Black people are killed by police, and Black, Latinx, and Native American communities are disproportionately decimated by COVID19, masses of powerful voices are speaking out against racial injustice. We cannot let this moment pass us by without making substantive changes to eliminate institutional violence against Black people, people of color, and all marginalized groups. There is a particular need for those of us at the intersection of white privilege and scientific/educational privilege to listen to Black voices as we reflect on our personal and professional relationships to racism in terms of 1) how we benefit from racism, 2) how we contribute to racism and patterns of racialization, and 3) how we can take accountability for harms done. By understanding the harm caused, we are better positioned to address it.

In an effort to investigate that harm, I worked with SFSU students to explore the role of eugenics in the history of our field and institution. While the road to accountability will be long and arduous, I hope that this work sparks other scientists to action and brings us a bit further down that road.

The entangled roots of eugenics, statistics, and population genetics

The term eugenics was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, a fellow of the Royal Society who’s credited with laying down foundational ideas in statistics, psychology, and criminology. Galton championed the emerging scientific field of eugenics and the political eugenics movement. Eugenics is rooted in the idea that a person’s genes determine their traits (e.g. height, disability, intelligence, sexuality, criminality), and that some trait variants are more valuable than others. This idea is inseparable from the idea that human trait diversity can be categorized into biologically distinct races, which follow a natural hierarchical order.  In Angela Saini’s book Superior (2019), she clearly lays out the political implications: If a person’s station in life is determined by their own genetics, rather than social experience and access to resources, then inequities in power and wealth would be natural and inevitable. This brand of genetic determinism has been used to justify slavery, colonization, and other manifestations of racism and ableism for centuries. With this deterministic theoretical underpinning, eugenics seeks to “improve” the human species through selective breeding, specific immigration standards, and other social policies

Far from being a fringe pseudoscience, the field of eugenics was widely accepted in science. In 1910 Charles Davenport established the Eugenics Record Office at the renowned research institute of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Through 1939, the Eugenics Record Office collected and published data to support eugenic policies of forced sterilization and immigration restrictions targeting people who were disabled, people of color, and/or poor. The results of eugenics research needed a reputable peer-reviewed academic journal venue. So in 1925, Karl Pearson, creator of the chi-squared test, p-value, and principal component analysis, established a prestigious journal for the field: The Annals of Eugenics.  Other influential members of the academic elite aligned themselves with the eugenics movement, including central figures in the history of evolution theory like R.A. Fisher, Julian Huxley, and J.B.S. Haldane.

We still see the impact today through lines of reasoning and linguistic footprints. An emblematic example is statistical regression analysis. In his efforts towards the “improvement of the human breed,” Galton performed calculations intended to determine to what degree parents with a desired trait, such as “civic worth,” would reliably produce children with the same trait. These calculations needed to account for an observation that troubled Galton: offspring of parents with extreme trait values have, on average, less extreme traits than their parents [1]. The name he gave to his observation— “regression towards mediocrity”, now usually called regression to the mean—suggests his value judgment about the “quality of parentages” that go “far back towards mediocrity.” Galton’s term regression now describes the class of statistical techniques referred to as regression analysis, which continues to be central in statistics, and is used across disciplines from biology to economics to sociology.

Shifting names for the study of the genetic basis of human traits

Eugenic science and policy, largely developed in the United States and England, were implemented in the extreme by Nazi Germany. The explicit scientific field of eugenics lost support as the specific atrocities of the Nazi Holocaust came to light. Because of this, we may like to think that present-day fields like population and human genetics have totally departed from their eugenic predecessors. Yet, it’s easy to find threads of research continuing under different names. For example, in 1954 Annals of Eugenics changed its title to the Annals of Human Genetics, which is still publishing in 2020. Saini notes that the same individual scientists who performed genetic research “gently maneuver[ed] themselves out of eugenics into allied fields that studied human difference in less controversial and more rigorous ways, such as genetics.” Intentional tactics like these have led to a cultivated amnesia about our academic history. Yet, these individuals are our academic ancestors, and we cannot avoid being influenced by their intellectual legacy. These connections are seldom discussed, to the extent that they are unknown to most present-day geneticists. It was only through an accident that I stumbled on a connection, this when I had nearly earned a PhD. How can we be accountable for our past when we don’t know the history of our own fields?

Today, we are seeing a surge of well-funded studies seeking to determine the genetic basis of traits with clear, well-studied environmental influences like height, intelligence, sexual behavior, and income.  These analyses have received numerous technical critiques that call into question the validity of the scientific inferences, noting that “while the benefits are far from obvious, the risks of such results being misinterpreted and misused are quite clear.” Yet, the persistence of these lines of inquiry belies a familiar preoccupation with inborn differences for traits of social consequence. As in the past, there are ideological stakes in these studies: if these studies did in fact prove that differences in income, for example, are fixed by genetics (genetic association studies are incapable of proving that), then egalitarian economic policies would be futile. The legacy of eugenics is apparent today in both our scientific research and our political context. Prestigious journals are publishing these studies as the political landscape includes openly eugenicist ideas and policies based on the alleged inferiority of some nations of individuals, backed up with horrific restrictive immigration policies, at a time when it needs to be said that Black Lives Matter.

Because genetic determinism is an implicit and stealth component of our academic inheritance, even well-meaning scientists working at respected institutions can unwittingly pursue research that supports eugenicist arguments. To avoid incurring more harm, it is crucial that we scientists understand and reckon with our past. Saini makes a compelling call-to-action: “Without ever really looking back to the past and asking how and where the idea of race [and eugenics] had been constructed in the first place, why it had been relentlessly abused—without questioning the motives of scientists such as Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, [R.A. Fischer, Julian Huxley, and J.B.S. Haldane]—in this glaring ‘absence of introspection,’ old ideas of race [and eugenics] could never completely disappear.” As a test case in examining an institution’s relationship with its eugenic past, three undergraduates and I embarked on a self-reflective history of the topic at San Francisco State University.

The “Eugenics” course was offered at SFSU until 1952, when “Human genetics” was first offered

The students went to the library to pore over archived paper copies of university bulletins. As amateur historians, we had a learning experience in the nature of archival records. Bulletins were not available for every year, and over time the information they included varied dramatically. Nonetheless, we found that “Eugenics” was offered through the Biology Department at SFSU starting at latest in 1926. The course description is informative: “Study of the facts and problems of human heredity and possibility of race betterment.” At the time, SFSU was San Francisco State Teachers College, so graduates were expected to use their education to teach the next generation. Positioning teachers to improve public support of eugenic principles was important to the mission of eugenics. Instilling eugenic reasoning into the broader population must have been highly valued as it was one of only 12 upper division elective courses.

“Eugenics” was offered for the last time in 1951, six years after the end of World War II. This lag time demonstrates how the academic community held on to eugenics, well after the genocide in Nazi Germany became public knowledge. Let’s take a moment to think about the impact of over a quarter-century of teaching students about “the facts and problems of human heredity and the possibility of race betterment.” Most of these students became teachers themselves, disseminating eugenic reasoning on to their students. It’s hard to say how many thousands of people were influenced by the ideas in this course. While my privilege prevents me from being able to speak to the experience of scientists of color who endured the course, I will speculate about the impact for white students. For white students, how did the scientific reasoning (however flawed) presented in this class bolster racism and internal bias over generations? How do those ingrained racist ideas influence a white police officer seeing a Black man? A white city planner deciding whether to zone for toxic industry in a Latinx neighborhood? A white scientist designing a curriculum for a genetics class today?

While “Eugenics” was not offered after 1951, a new course appeared in 1952, “Human genetics,” described as “Principle of inheritance as applied to man; the role of heredity and environment; population genetics.” From these course descriptions, we see consistent interest in human heredity with movement away from blatant race science, towards population genetics and environmental factors. We’re very curious about the specific comparative curricula of these courses, but syllabi were not archived.

Beginning to envision an accountable scientific future

Some might be surprised to find this connection at SFSU, a university with a history rooted in progressivism, as evidenced in its mission statement that centers an “unwavering commitment to social justice.” Yet, eugenic thinking has pervaded the political spectrum, including progressive supporters like W.E.B. Du Bois and Margaret Sanger. Far from unique, the trajectory of the eugenics course at SFSU is likely common. We hope that this project inspires researchers at other universities to look into their own institutional histories. This type of research into university archives is quite feasible for a small team of dedicated undergraduates, perhaps especially those looking for a senior thesis or capstone project. A set of projects at different universities would illuminate the landscape and impact of eugenics course offerings.

While our findings confirmed my suspicions, it’s still jarring to see this history at my institution, conceptually related to the very Genetics class that I teach today. Once we are aware of these connections, what can we do to be accountable as well-intended, anti-racist heirs of this legacy? Our scientific training has provided us powerful tools of critical examination, tools which we can direct to investigate the ways our research, teaching, and scientific culture are influenced by our eugenic roots.  Our small exploration here has led me to question ideas central to both my population genetics training (why is it so common for evolutionary models to assume a single fixed optimum value for a trait?), and the institutional legacy of how we teach genetics (why do we emphasize inheritance of Mendelian traits when we know the vast majority of traits are polygenic and influenced by environmental factors?).

By grappling with questions like these, we can begin a process of accountability, squaring up with our scientific past, and intentionally shaping our future. As one small step, I now attempt to address some of the harm caused by my university’s historic eugenics course in my own genetics course by explicitly discussing eugenics within a broader anti-racist and anti-eugenics curriculum. While we cannot sever the connections to our institutional and academic roots in eugenics, with a better understanding of our history, we will be better equipped to both respond to eugenic ideas as they re-emerge, and to create a scientific culture that values justice.

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About the author:

Rori Rohlfs is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at San Francisco State University.

Guest post by CourseSource Editor-in-Chief Michelle Smith and Managing Editor Erin Vinson.

In partnership with Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER) meeting, CourseSource is hosting an ONLINE Writing Studio Short Course. We have switched to an online setting because the SABER meeting will no longer be taking place in Minneapolis, MN this summer.

We will offer this online Writing Studio twice this summer:

• June 15–17 from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. EDT
• July 21–23 from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. EDT

We acknowledge that many of you needed to quickly switch to online education this spring. CourseSource is supportive of your efforts and hopes that you will consider sharing your innovative ideas through future publications.

About CourseSource

CourseSource is a peer-reviewed and open-access journal that publishes tested, evidence-based undergraduate activities for life sciences. The articles include details in a format, style, and voice that support replicability. Publishing activities in CourseSource provides authors with recognition of the creativity, experience, and time needed to develop effective classroom materials, while also supporting the dissemination of evidence-based teaching practices. Authors can list CourseSource articles in the peer-reviewed publication section of their curriculum vitae and use them as evidence for excellence in teaching.

Eligibility

The Writing Studio Short Course is open to instructors (including faculty, graduate students, and postdocs) who teach biology to undergraduate students and are planning to publish an activity in CourseSource.

Participants must commit to attending the full Writing Studio Short Course, either the June or July session. Preference is given to applicants who have taught the activity that they will be working on at the Writing Studio and who have not previously published in CourseSource. Faculty from community colleges, primarily undergraduate institutions, and minority-serving institutions (colleges and universities) are encouraged to apply.

Participant Benefits

The Writing Studio will provide time for you to work on your CourseSource manuscript and receive advice and feedback from editorial staff. We will also connect you with other prospective authors.

To apply, visit this link: https://umaine.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_2uvbistCjthb8Rn. Application review will begin on April 20, 2020. If you have questions, contact Editor-in-Chief Michelle Smith and Managing Editor Erin Vinson.

Guest post by Abha Ahuja, Assistant Professor of Natural Sciences at Minerva Schools at KGI.

As on-campus meetings for laboratory courses are canceled, you might be wondering if you’ll be able to meet your goals in a virtual environment. It will take some adjustment, but it is doable if you are strategic about what you want your students to learn and why. Begin by asking yourself, “What was the goal of the lab session and lab course?” Typically, lab courses allow students to gain some exposure to specific techniques and instrumentation. Ultimately, however, the larger purpose of labs is to allow students to apply the process of science and develop scientific reasoning skills. With this new framing, here are three approaches that allow students to conduct authentic research (without setting foot in the lab!).

Do a structured analysis of primary literature: Engaging with primary literature promotes the development of data interpretation skills and allows students to see how specific techniques fit into their scientific discipline. However, left to their own devices, novices get overwhelmed by jargon and technical details (Lie et al. 2016) and lose the forest for the trees. Therefore, it is important to structure this task and guide students’ reading to clarify critical concepts and emphasize aspects most relevant to your course goals and learning outcomes. 

• Write a custom reading guide including an explanation of why you selected a particular article and how it links to the course. Design study questions that require students to articulate the big question and specific hypotheses, key features of the study design, and how specific results relate to the authors’ conclusion. In this annotated sample custom reading guide, I illustrate a flipped-classroom approach.
• Primers in Genetics from the Genetic Society of America are a fantastic resource to support the use of peer-reviewed articles in college classrooms. Use these primers to write your reading guides or as supplementary resources for students. 
• CREATE is a peer-reviewed, evidence-based strategy for intensive analysis of Primary Literature. A CREATE module consists of four articles, published from the same lab. You can task students to read and analyze these articles sequentially, and there are several ready-to-use modules and roadmaps on a variety of topics available.

Analyze real-world data sets: Ask students to analyze and visualize real-world data, then interpret and contextualize their findings. This will allow them to practice and improve their data analysis and quantitative reasoning skills. Moreover, compared to cook-book labs, using authentic data is more interesting and engaging for students (Kjelvik & Schultheis 2019). Try these freely available data sources that include advice on implementation and execution:

• Data nuggets 
• Course Source Bioinformatics modules 
• QUBES

Write mock grant proposals: Research proposals require students to synthesize and critique primary literature, think creatively about open questions in a line of inquiry, and design studies to test their ideas. Best practices for such assignments include scaffolding the grant writing process with multiple staggered deadlines, sharing rubrics and evaluation criteria, and integrating opportunities for feedback and deliberate practice. The articles below contain several useful resources including grading rubrics and template assignment directions. 

• “Thinking like a neuroscientist”: Using scaffolded grant proposals to foster scientific thinking in a freshman neuroscience course
• The use of mock NSF-type grant proposals and blind peer review as the capstone assignment in upper-level neurobiology and cell biology courses

To make class time feel engaging, ask students to prepare parts of the assignment tasks in advance and spend class time having students work in small groups to improve and iterate on their work. Peer instruction will help students learn from each other and give them a valuable opportunity to connect, which is especially important if they are all suddenly remote. For instance, you might follow up on grant proposals with a mock grant panel in class. Each of these strategies can also be adapted to asynchronous classes; Instructors could spread assignment tasks over several weeks, and students would use collaborative document editing tools (such as Google Documents) to exchange feedback asynchronously. Collaboration is an essential part of the scientific process; this just might be an opportunity to teach students more than they could have learned in a traditional lab.

Bibliography

Bringing authentic research and data into K-16 classrooms. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://datanuggets.org/

Bioinformatics. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.coursesource.org/courses/search/c/bioinformatics

Hoskins, S. G., Stevens, L. M., & Nehm, R. H. (2007). Selective Use of the Primary Literature Transforms the Classroom Into a Virtual Laboratory. Genetics, 176(3), 1381–1389. doi: 10.1534/genetics.107.071183

Itagaki H. (2013). The Use of Mock NSF-type Grant Proposals and Blind Peer Review as the Capstone Assignment in Upper-Level Neurobiology and Cell Biology Courses. Journal of undergraduate neuroscience education : JUNE : a publication of FUN, Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience, 12(1), A75–A84.

Kjelvik, M. K., & Schultheis, E. H. (2019). Getting Messy with Authentic Data: Exploring the Potential of Using Data from Scientific Research to Support Student Data Literacy. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 18(2). doi: 10.1187/cbe.18-02-0023

Köver, H., Wirt, S. E., Owens, M. T., & Dosmann, A. J. (2014). “Thinking like a Neuroscientist”: Using Scaffolded Grant Proposals to Foster Scientific Thinking in a Freshman Neuroscience Course. Journal of undergraduate neuroscience education: JUNE: a publication of FUN, Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience, 13(1), A29–A40.

Lie, R., Abdullah, C., He, W., & Tour, E. (2016). Perceived Challenges in Primary Literature in a Master’s Class: Effects of Experience and Instruction. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 15(4). doi: 10.1187/cbe.15-09-0198

Teaching Quantitative Biology Online. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://qubeshub.org/community/groups/quant_bio_online/resources

About the Author

Abha Ahuja is an Assistant Professor of Natural Sciences at Minerva Schools at Keck Graduate Institute, where she teaches in a virtual classroom using active learning pedagogy. If you want to learn more about teaching life sciences via active learning online email me at abha@minerva.kgi.edu.

Guest post by Cassidy Villeneuve, Wiki Education.

A Wikipedia writing assignment is a great opportunity for instructors to teach science communication skills on a world stage. In this kind of assignment, genetics students create or improve Wikipedia articles related to course topics. They’re especially well equipped to translate scientific concepts this way for a general audience, because they remember what it was like learning these concepts for the first time. And they feel an increased sense of motivation to produce quality work, considering that millions of readers can access it. Students also gain familiarity with the backend of a website they use all the time, preparing them to consume information online with a more critical lens in the future. 

If you’re teaching an upcoming course, consider utilizing an assignment like this. Wiki Education has free assignment templates, student trainings, and staff support to help you be successful. Here are just a few success stories from genetics and other biology courses that have done this in the past!

Students dive deep into a niche topic by improving a “stub” article

Many biology and genetics-related courses that incorporate Wikipedia writing assignments focus on Wikipedia’s “stub” articles, which are only a few sentences long. They’re a great starting place for students who don’t necessarily have the expertise to edit high-value, frequently visited pages.

That’s exactly what Laura Reed’s students did at the University of Alabama last fall. Among the 21 Wikipedia articles that her 17 students expanded, the one about odorant-binding proteins stands out. The student added 39 new references to it! 

Students edit high-value Wikipedia articles about fundamental biology topics

A student in Eric Guisbert’s developmental and molecular biology course at the Florida Institute of Technology contributed content to Wikipedia’s cell division article last spring. The page receives about 1,000 pageviews every day. It was a great chance for a single student to make a big impact by putting well-researched information related to course topics into the hands of so many people at once.

In addition to trainings that prepare students to make meaningful content edits, Wiki Education’s Dashboard has an Authorship Highlighting feature. Instructors can see exactly what each student contributed to their assigned article. See Guisbert’s student’s contributions to the cell division article, for example. While the student only added about 1,500 words, the process of contributing to Wikipedia required them to:

• understand how to evaluate their article for missing content,
• find sources that meet Wikipedia’s standards, and
• incorporate their research into the article’s existing content in a succinct way.

Wiki Education trainings provide guidance for the Wikipedia side of things, while instructors provide content expertise. By the end of this rigorous process, students can really feel like an expert!

Students create brand new articles

Some instructors who conduct this assignment have students create new articles for topics previously unrepresented on Wikipedia. Quite a few students did so in Nigel Atkinson’s epigenetics course at the University of Texas at Austin in Spring 2018. The Wikipedia article about the epigenetics of anxiety and stress-related disorders is brand new. You can already see through Authorship Highlighting on the Dashboard that Wikipedia volunteers have added some content to the article since the student created it. Collaborating to expand information about topics is what Wikipedia is all about!

Want to get involved?

There are a few ways you can get involved in improving science content on Wikipedia!

• Use Wiki Education’s free assignment templates to have your students write Wikipedia articles related to genetics: teach.wikiedu.org. 
• Learn how to edit Wikipedia yourself and expand your educational reach to the public: learn.wikiedu.org.
• Explore how you and your students can contribute data about genetics to Wikidata, the global open data repository that informs AI like Siri: data.wikiedu.org. 

About the author:

Cassidy Villeneuve is Wiki Education’s Outreach and Communications Associate

Improving research mentor training requires new approaches.

Mentoring is essential for the success of researchers at all career stages, but not all mentor-mentee relationships are created equal. Students from historically underrepresented backgrounds often receive less mentoring than their peers, and many mentors are not trained in how to mentor effectively. To address some of these needs, Entering Mentoring, an evidence-based program for research mentor training, was developed and shown to be effective in improving mentoring. 

Of course, such programs are only useful if people have access to them. In CBE—Life Sciences Education, Spencer et al. report on the infrastructure they have created to facilitate more widespread research mentor training.

The first hurdle that must be cleared for more mentors to receive training is to have more people capable of giving the training. Therefore, the authors took a train-the-trainer approach and recruited and trained master facilitators to instruct others in how to implement research mentor training, termed facilitator training. This approach has resulted in nearly 600 people being trained as facilitators, with over 4,000 mentors receiving research mentor training.

In order to be broadly useful, training for mentors needs to be applicable in a variety of settings, including at different institutions and for researchers at multiple career stages. The original Entering Mentoring program was designed as a summer seminar for graduate students mentoring undergraduates, but it has been expanded for different research areas and for those mentoring everyone from undergraduates to junior faculty. Modules to address specific concerns, like culturally aware mentoring, have also been developed, and there are resources available for structuring the programs in a variety of formats.

Even though a person might be trained in facilitating research mentor training, actually running such workshops requires time, resources, and support, which are not always available. To help address these concerns, facilitator training workshops were restructured to include resources and strategies for overcoming obstacles to implementation, such as encouraging facilitators at the same or similar institutions to cooperatively plan.

As mentorship programs expand, quality control is necessary to ensure that workshops are productive and that resources are accessible. Therefore, assessment tools were developed for facilitators to evaluate workshops they run, and a centralized evaluation system was developed to more effectively make use of feedback.

By developing this infrastructure, better training will become more accessible for more mentors. Early results of self-reported surveys suggest that research mentor training is already being effectively implemented—ultimately helping make science more accessible and productive. 

CITATION:

Building a Sustainable National Infrastructure to Expand Research Mentor Training

Kimberly C. Spencer, Melissa McDaniels, Emily Utzerath, Jenna Griebel Rogers, Christine A. Sorkness, Pamela Asquith, Christine Pfund

CBE—Life Sciences Education Published Online: 28 Aug 2018

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.18-03-0034

Bruce Weir, PhD, of the University of Washington in Seattle is the recipient of the 2019 Genetics Society of America (GSA) Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education, in recognition of his work training thousands of researchers in the rigorous use of statistical analysis methods for genetic and genomic data.

The Jones Award recognizes individuals or groups that have had a significant, sustained impact on genetics education at any level.

“Bruce has made outstanding contributions to the training of basic and applied population and quantitative geneticists from across the globe for more than 40 years,” says Trudy Mackay, a professor of biological sciences at North Carolina State University (now at Clemson University) and one of the scientists who nominated Weir for the award.

His contributions fall into three categories: the acclaimed Summer Institute in Statistical Genetics (SISG), which has been held continuously for 23 years and has trained more than 10,000 researchers worldwide; the popular graduate-level textbook Genetic Data Analysis; and the training of a growing number of forensic geneticists during the rise of DNA evidence in courts around the world.

Weir grew up and attended college in New Zealand, majoring in mathematics. He credits his discovery of statistical genetics to a summer internship with researcher Brian Hayman, who recommended the PhD program at North Carolina State University for pursuing Weir’s newly found interest. In Raleigh, he trained with C. Clark Cockerham and then completed his postdoctoral studies with plant geneticist Robert W. Allard at the University of California, Davis.

From Davis, Weir returned to New Zealand to teach at Massey University before Cockerham lured him back to North Carolina State University in 1976. Weir spent the next three decades of his career in Raleigh. He became the William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of Statistics and Genetics in 1992.

Inspired by a 1995 summer course for animal geneticists at the University of Guelph in Canada, Weir decided to hold the first SISG in Raleigh in 1996. With limited advertising and funding, the inaugural Institute drew about 100 attendants. Weir quickly realized that the SISG filled an important niche. While technological advances were rapidly increasing the amount of genetic and genomic data requiring statistical analysis, graduate programs in the biological sciences rarely offered statistics courses that were tailored to the problems students were addressing in their dissertation projects.

In 1997, the SISG began receiving funding from the National Science Foundation, and in 1999 the National Institutes of Health added its support, with most of the funds over the past two decades supporting the attendance of US graduate students. The SISG moved from Raleigh to Seattle when Weir was appointed Chair of the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Washington in 2006. To reach a global audience, the Institute has also been held in 15 (and counting) countries outside the United States.

Weir’s interest in authoring a textbook started even earlier in his career. The 1990 edition of Genetic Data Analysis helped plant the seed for the first SISG in 1996, and the two efforts have been synergistic ever since. By inviting active researchers with a record of excellent teaching as SISG guest instructors, Weir stays abreast of the larger field, which helps update the book’s content over time. The 3^rdedition, co-authored with Jérôme Goudet at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, is expected to be published in 2020. It will continue to cover the theoretical underpinnings of population genetics. The book’s statistical code, written in the R programming language, will add to its appeal for applied researchers with a wide range of data management and analysis needs.

A new area of application for Weir’s research interests emerged in 1989: forensic genetics. After the FBI introduced DNA genotyping in courts, it soon sought Weir’s expertise in matched-pair probability calculations for the defendant’s DNA and a crime scene sample. Weir continues to work with FBI researchers today and serves on national committees to help develop legal guidelines for interpreting DNA evidence in court. He says this work is both rewarding and challenging, as the worlds of science (seeking the truth) and law (seeking justice) don’t always coincide. He co-authored the textbook Interpreting DNA Evidence, published in 1998, with forensic scientist Ian Evett.

Weir’s applied projects extend beyond forensic investigations of human samples. In 2018, he co-authored a high-impact paper about ivory poaching, the fourth-largest transnational crime that frequently funds drug trafficking and other criminal activities.

The study was based on an elephant DNA database that UW biology professor Samuel Wasser assembled from ivory and scat samples collected throughout Africa. Using 16 markers with geography-specific allele frequencies, the researchers were able to trace ivory shipments seized at different ports to the same origin. This combats a strategy commonly used by large ivory smuggling cartels: separating the two tusks of one elephant to make it more difficult to identify their shared origin.

Together, the SISG, the textbook, and the training of the forensic community are a powerful testament to Weir’s commitment to education. “Any of these three contributions would clearly make Bruce a very strong candidate,” says Bruce Walsh, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and of public health, at the University of Arizona and one of the scientists who nominated Weir for the award. “The combination of all three is unbeatable.”

Based in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Washington, which he chaired from 2006 to 2014, Weir also serves as Director of the Genetics Analysis Center, the Institute of Public Health Genetics, and the Graduate Program in Public Health Genetics. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association, and the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. In addition to his classroom teaching, Weir has trained and mentored 33 doctoral students and 19 postdoctoral fellows. Many of them work as faculty members and scientists at leading universities, government agencies, and private companies around the world.

Weir joined the GSA a graduate student. He served as an Associate Editor for the GSA journal GENETICS from 1977 to 1997 and as the GSA Treasurer from 2002 to 2005. The Elizabeth W. Jones Award will be presented at The Allied Genetics Conference, which will be held April 22–26, 2020, in the Metro Washington, DC region.

The award was named posthumously for Elizabeth W. Jones (1939-2008), who was the recipient of the first GSA Excellence in Education Award in 2007. She was a renowned geneticist and educator who served as GSA president (1987) and as Editor in Chief of GENETICS for nearly 12 years.