The science of teamwork
By Hannah Benoit
Robert Morris doesn't waste time. The lean, silver-haired biology professor talks briskly and moves with the erect gait of a gazelle. On campus, he has been known to run from place to place instead of walking.
Ask him why, and he'll likely tell you he needs the exercise-and has to get where he's going anyway. So why not run?
When it comes to his work, though, the cell biologist displays a Zen-like patience.
"As a scientist, you work for years and years, maybe a decade, between your major discoveries," Morris says. "When you have them, you need to savor them.... In the meantime, you're working toward the next discovery with smaller steps. You have to enjoy those smaller discoveries-enjoy the process. Because it's mostly process."
Listening to Morris talk about his research-and his Wheaton student collaborators-you know for sure he enjoys the process. He enjoys the process of teaching even more. Combine the two-research and teaching-and "Dr. Bob" is one happy man.
"I came to Wheaton because I wanted the primary focus of my career to be on teaching," he says with a smile that rarely fades. "Lab research is one of the most enjoyable ways of teaching. It's a deeper form of understanding you're striving for, and it's a much closer interaction than one gets in a classroom.
"The reason I'm a scientist is that you get to discover new phenomena no human has ever known before. It doesn't matter whether you're an undergraduate or a college professor-the discovery doesn't 'care' who discovers it. Students have the chance to make true breakthroughs. And the opportunity to be there when a student makes such a discovery is an indescribable privilege."
Working together, Morris's team has produced discoveries both large and small during his nine years at Wheaton. The team is currently studying the formation of cilia in sea urchin embryos, but their broader purpose is to examine the roles that cell motility plays in animal development-how movement is involved in turning an egg into an entire organism.
In 2006, the Morris lab helped annotate the complete genome sequence of the purple sea urchin as part of an international consortium of scientists. Morris and six Wheaton students were among the 220 authors of a paper presenting the findings in Science magazine that year. (Of the dozens of institutions involved in the project, Wheaton was the only liberal arts college.) The Wheaton team also published their data in Developmental Biology.
One of the co-authors was Blair Rossetti '09, a biochemistry major and a senior member of the Morris lab this year. This summer, both Rossetti and Morris had appointments at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), the world-renowned research center in the Cape Cod town of Woods Hole. Morris furthered his research there as an Evelyn and Melvin Spiegel Fellow, taking advantage of the MBL's cutting-edge equipment and the opportunity to collaborate closely with other sea urchin biologists. Rossetti worked as a technician in the microscopy department for the second consecutive summer, helping to keep that cutting-edge multimillion-dollar equipment up and running. In his "spare" time, Rossetti joined Morris in his cilia research. 
With contributions to two prestigious publications and two summers at the MBL to his credit, Rossetti is pleased he chose to study science at Wheaton. "It's a trade-off between the facilities a large university might be able to offer, and the one-on-one time with the professors," he says. "For me, the time is more important." In the Morris lab, students can go as far as their interest and ambition take them.
"At the bigger research institutions, undergraduates don't get to do much. The senior members of the lab basically do everything that's important. But at Wheaton, if you want to do the important projects, you can-and then you can do even bigger projects. You make it what you want it to be."
In the Morris lab, students are involved in every aspect of the work, from feeding the sea urchins to conducting an entire experiment on their own. The students also helped gather data for Morris's MBL fellowship proposal this year.
"It's really my students who earned this opportunity for me," Morris says, "and it's to their credit that our lab is competitive with the top labs in the world in studying cell motility and development."
When Morris says that science is "mostly process," he's not exaggerating. The team does microinjections into living cells, targeting specific genes in order to test their function in the organism. Conducting a single microinjection experiment takes more than a thousand steps. The team even has to craft its own needles using a special needle puller, which heats a glass capillary and stretches the end into a tip that's thinner than a micron-one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair. That's too fine to be seen by the naked eye, but watch out: "If you get a splinter from one of these, it lasts a long time," Morris says.
"But one of the nice things is, this work is very hands on. The students build their own apparatus. And when they put it on the microscope and they inject their own cell, they've done all of it themselves."
The unappreciated organelle
When Morris describes his research and the science behind it, it's clear why his students call him a gifted teacher. He has a way of making complex topics understandable even to those who might say, "I'm not a science person."
"Some people have been brainwashed," he says. "They think science is unapproachable and scary, when in fact everybody does it-they just don't put the name 'science' on it. Science is a matter of asking questions, gathering information to find an answer, and then adjusting your beliefs based on the information you get. Every single person does that, even if it's 'I can't find my toothbrush. It must be lost. It probably fell beside the sink. Yup, there it is.'
“Everybody tests their own ideas by finding out new information. Some of us just happen to do it for a living."
Admittedly, finding a lost toothbrush is a lot simpler than studying the "coordination of ciliogenesis and cytoskeletal dynamics in sea urchin embryos"-Morris's summer research topic. He arrived at the MBL with an ambitious research agenda, knowing he would probably have to winnow it down to the projects most likely to yield results quickly. That's because Morris and his team are always focused on getting data for their next peer-reviewed paper. Most of those papers have multiple authors, since several students contribute significant data over time.
In their study of cell motility, they focus on the formation of cilia, "those long, whip-like appendages that stick off of cells and are most famous for beating on the surface to move fluids over that cell," he says. "But we've discovered in recent years that cilia have been an unappreciated organelle."
It turns out that all human cells are ciliated, he says, though most have immotile sensory cilia that act as cellular antennae. Studying cilia offers a glimpse into how our own bodies sense their environment, because three of the five senses-vision, hearing and smell-are conducted by cilia. For example, the sensory segment of a rod cell in the eye is a modified cilium, as is the sensory ending of an olfactory neuron. 
Furthermore, ciliary defects play a key role in a variety of human diseases and conditions, including birth defects, polycystic kidney disease, blindness and infertility.
"We study the mechanisms of cilia formation as a basic process of cell development," says Morris, "but it has important clinical applications. By studying the normal processes of cilia development, we hope to shed light on what happens when these processes go awry."
A certain spark
When selecting new members for his lab, Morris looks for students with a certain "spark." Drive and passion, he says, are even more important than book knowledge. "That drive is what gets you through the plain and simple tedium involved in completing a round of experiments with enough replicates to produce a publishable unit."
He also looks for students who are natural leaders, since the senior members of the lab coach and mentor the younger ones. Amanda Rawson '09 is one such leader, whose dedication to the success of her peers, Morris says, is as strong as her drive to achieve. Rawson, who plans to go to medical school, interned at the University of Massachusetts Medical School this summer, assisting with two clinical investigations-a study of post-surgical bariatric patients and a study of neutrophil gene expression. Her self-designed internship was funded by the Wheaton Fellows program.
"I have to credit Dr. Bob," Rawson says, "because he gave my work credibility. Without the experience I gained in his lab, I do not think these summer opportunities would have been possible."
David Perelman '11 quickly became one of the Morris lab's most enthusiastic members in his freshman year.
"When you give David a research paper to read, he comes back with twice as many words on it, because he's added so many notes in the margins," Morris says. "He goes to Amanda and Blair for help decoding it, and then comes to me with additional questions. Working as a layered team that way, we go much farther much faster than we would if it were a hierarchical system."
Blair Rossetti, who won a prestigious Barry M. Goldwater science scholarship this year, brings his own mix of talents.
"I like to tinker," he says, noting that he was fascinated with robotics as a child. Last semester, Rossetti took a computer class with professors Betsey Dyer (biology) and Mark LeBlanc (computer science) and discovered he had a talent for programming.
"I applied almost everything I learned to the work in the lab," he says.
Programming skills are important in today's research labs, since so much of the work involves the manipulation of data on a computer instead of the traditional "wet bench" lab experiments. Morris's lab combines both techniques.
The team uses a computer program called BLAST (Basic Linear Alignment Search Tool) to help identify the genes in the sea urchin genome that code for motor proteins.
"It's basically like Google for DNA," says Rossetti, "in the sense that it searches for particular sequences in the whole genome."
In order to identify the ciliary genes in the sea urchin, the researchers used BLAST to compare the sea urchin genome with an already decoded genome, that of the single-celled algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii (or "Chlamy" for short).
"We take each of the known ciliary genes from Chlamy and search throughout the sea urchin genome for that specific sequence. If we find a close match, that's a potential ciliary gene in the sea urchin," Rossetti explains.
Then they take all the potential matches and do a reverse BLAST, from sea urchin to Chlamy. The best matches from this so-called reciprocal BLAST are those most likely to be ciliary genes. In turn, the team will investigate the roles of these genes via so-called knockdown experiments, in which they suppress a particular gene and observe what function is missing as the embryo develops.
Until recently, the BLAST searching was a tedious process, since the sequences had to be fed into the computer one at a time. Rossetti downloaded a program that would allow the team to process the sequences in batches. He then wrote an original program that greatly simplified the team's sorting and analysis of the computer's results.
What used to take hundreds or even thousands of hours now takes just seconds. Morris says Rossetti's achievement is an example of what undergraduate scientists can accomplish under the right circumstances.
"Give students the tools and the time and the guidance, and they'll make discoveries you couldn't have imagined."
Graduates of the Morris lab have gone on to reach for further discoveries. Julia Lowe '04 recently graduated from Jefferson Medical College. Christopher English '03 is studying cell and molecular biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, while Joshua Nordberg '00 is working toward his Ph.D. in biology at UMass Medical School. There he is studying how the centrosome-a cellular organelle-duplicates itself. Defects in the duplication process can lead to genetic instability and cancer, Nordberg explains, "so the more we understand about this process, the more we hope we can understand about how cancer develops."
Nordberg, who originally wanted to become a surgeon, says his experience in Morris's lab turned him toward a career in laboratory research.
"I feel he taught his classes at an almost graduate level," Nordberg recalls. "We were all expected to perform as young scientists, developing our analytical skills and using them to solve problems. Those of us lucky enough to work in his lab received even higher-level instruction."
As one of Morris's first lab students at Wheaton, Nordberg helped launch the work on cilia formation that continues at Wheaton and Woods Hole today. In fact, the Morris lab will soon publish a paper that has been nearly a decade in the making.
"Those data go back eight years, to my earliest time at Wheaton," Morris says. "It sometimes takes that long: Josh Nordberg will be a co-author on that paper!"
Do you have a comment about this story? e-mail Hannah Benoit at benoit_hannah@wheatoncollege.edu.
