At Student Research Day, a primer on the scientific method

When medical student Edwin Anderson of Wilmington, N.C., wrote his Yale thesis in 1837, he would not have expected it to generate excitement a century and a half later. Bearing the Latin title De Calculo Vesicae, Anderson’s treatise on bladder stones made its case in 155 pages and 40 chapters and contained two pages of references, not unusual for its day. What set it apart 152 years later was its discovery among the archives by a professor tracing the roots of student research at Yale.

The professor, John Forrest, M.D. ’67, came across the slim volume in 1989 while preparing remarks for the 150th anniversary of the thesis requirement, first documented in the medical school Bulletin in 1839. (Anderson’s work, the earliest bound thesis that has been located, is among a handful known to predate the requirement; the earliest was written in 1823.)

In early May, Forrest brought Anderson’s work to Student Research Day, the annual celebration of scientific inquiry by students. What began in 1987 as a yearly poster session has become one of the brightest days on the academic calendar. It is also an opportunity for medical students to sit at the feet of leading figures in science and medicine who visit under the auspices of the Lee E. Farr, M.D. ’33, Lectureship. This year, Nobel laureate and former NIH Director Harold Varmus delivered a talk entitled “Genes and Cancer: The Quest Continues.”

Forrest told students and faculty who gathered to hear presentations of five outstanding works that “the value of the thesis is to teach that all physicians are scientists. It is a way,” he said, “to help ensure that Yale medical students learn the scientific method from the inside out.”

Graduate research conference links students across campus

With 100 posters on display and 370 registrants, this year’s Graduate Student Research Symposium on May 4 and 5 achieved the greatest participation in its five-year history. For the first time, the symposium was open to submissions by postdoctoral fellows as well as graduate students. Faculty members led mini-symposia in each of 10 research categories.

“We modeled it like a national conference,” said Shilpa Patel, who organized the conference with fellow pharmacology student Helen Seow. In a break from past years, posters were organized by interdisciplinary topics and presenters discussed their particular disciplines during poster mini-symposia. This allowed researchers to break out of their specialties and meet others at Yale who are working on a different aspects of common fields, Patel said. “Yale is a very collaborative environment to do science,” she added.

The event also featured talks by Nobel laureate Günter Blobel, M.D., Ph.D., and MIT biology professor Harvey Lodish, Ph.D. Lodish studies two classes of membrane proteins: transporters which move nutrients into and out of cells, and receptors which bind chemical signaling molecules in the environment of a cell and transmit these signals to the cell’s interior.

Blobel, a cell and molecular biologist at Rockefeller University, won the 1999 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his discovery that proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in the cell. During the symposium he gave the first George Palade Lecture, sponsored by the Department of Cell Biology in conjunction with the GSRS. The lecture honors Palade, the founder of the section of cell biology. Palade, himself a Nobel laureate in 1974, introduced Blobel via videotape from his home in California. In his talk, Blobel discussed the research that led to his discovery about signals in protein transport. He began in the 1970s by finding the signal that guides newly synthesized proteins through the membrane of the endoplasmic reticulum. “What wasn’t known were the molecular mechanisms by which this pathway operated,” Blobel said. His pursuit of an answer to this question led to his subsequent discoveries.