Provocative science

In a darkened lecture hall on Halloween, students in Phil Mixter’s general microbiology class learned three phrases guaranteed to send chills down their spines: Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, Unit 731 and Sverdlovsk.

Deadly serious subjects — essentially biological warfare involving government collusion or coercion that resulted in hundreds and hundreds of excruciating deaths — but the delivery was, well, imaginative.

Just past noon, a black-caped figure carrying a lighted jack-o-lantern slowly made his way from the back of a hushed Fulmer 226 to the front.

“I’m glad you’re here,” said the creature with the ghoulish face. “My name is Death.”

As it turns out, Mixter, a clinical research professor in the School of Molecular Biosciences, had had an “accident” and had asked Death to teach the class, with two conditions: make it true and make it testable.

“One does not make conditions of Death!” Death insisted, as laughter broke out among the 100 or so students in the audience. Nevertheless, he agreed. But, because Death is a busy man, he conjured the ghost of Rod Serling to help him, in the style of the 1970s television program, Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.

So, for the remainder of the hour and 15 minute class, Rod Serling would deliver a cryptic introduction and reveal a corresponding painting, and then Death would tell a horrific story of deadly microbes and human cruelty.

Teaching that sticks
Death was actually John Dahl, assistant professor in the School of Molecular Biosciences, and the mastermind behind the innovative presentation. Mixter, in a dark suit, white shirt and striped tie, was the clipped and ominous-sounding Serling.

“Halloween is an excuse to push the boundaries of the normal classroom experience more than usual, which John has taught me to do regularly,” Mixter said.

For his part, Dahl said he was inspired by Mixter’s enthusiasm for the project, which they began developing two years ago when they were team teaching the class and sitting in on each other’s lectures.

It was time well spent. “We used that collaborative time to come up with something we wouldn’t have done individually.”

While each of them says the other has influenced his teaching style and philosophy in myriad ways, the Halloween lecture is the most dramatic example of their collaboration — and one they are writing about for the journal “The American Biology Teacher.”

“We love to make this course matter to students,” Mixter said. “Students respond when we go out of our way to drive these points home and, in our experience, this type of presentation really sticks.”

Mixter said he often tries to break up the traditional lecture format with mixed media presentations, or perhaps just using a cordless microphone to work the lecture hall in the style of a talk show host. But, he said, the Halloween lecture pulls out all the stops, incorporating theater, fine art (Dahl painted the somber, abstract paintings), music and film clips.

Compelling subjects
Though Dahl is not teaching the course this year, he agreed to return as a guest lecturer on one condition: he didn’t want to play himself, he wanted to play Death.
“To be honest, I think Halloween and teaching go hand in hand,” Dahl said. At Halloween, as in teaching, people can take on different personas in an attempt to capture someone else’s imagination.

Death’s sometimes over-the-top pronouncements elicited laughter from time to time, but the subject matter was gut wrenching. First there was the Tuskegee Experiment — in which public health officials treated a group of 400 black men in Macon County, Ala., as lab experiments from 1932 to 1972, not only withholding treatment that could have cured them of syphilis, but subjecting them to dangerous and excruciating procedures to gather data for their research.

Then, in “Deal with the Devil,” Dahl described a Japanese WWII research effort at Unit 731, where prisoners of war were infected with the bubonic plague and then cut open — sometimes without anesthesia — so researchers could determine how the disease affected their internal organs. The final segment was about a government coverup following a deadly accident at a clandestine biological weapons factory in the Ukraine in 1979.

“It’s uncomfortable stuff,’ Dahl said after the lecture. “We think of microbiology as being an endeavor that leads to making life better for people, but it can be used for good or evil,” he said.

Helping students see that and, more important, see the need to ask questions and become informed about issues of science and public policy is a current that runs through the class. Only about a quarter of the students in the class will go on to a career involving microbiology, Mixter said, but all of them will be citizens whose lives are impacted by science.

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