A 21st Century View of Biology
Change is brewing in the field, and UK is securing its place as a center of important activity.
by Rebekah Tilley
photos by Lee Thomas
After spending 20 years working his way from assistant professor to chair of the Department of Biology at Texas A&M University, Vincent Cassone finally made it to Kentucky. “The joke you see on bumper stickers in Texas is that, while I wasn’t born here, I got here as quickly as I could,” Cassone laughs. In August 2008, Cassone accepted the position of professor and chair of the UK Department of Biology, and brought with him a posse of faculty, post-docs and graduate students, with plans to build on the department’s solid tradition of excellence.
In his office, Cassone and associate professor Jim Krupa hover over a biology monograph by W. D. Funkhouser lying on the desk. It is a first edition, and in the margins are Funkhouser’s handwritten notes. “I’ve always had a strange romantic fascination with Kentucky,” Cassone said. “It’s a beautiful state with an amazing history just as the department itself has an amazing history. This is the place where Thomas Hunt Morgan started, and he basically invented modern genetics. John T. Scopes was a student here, and in his memoirs pointed to Funkhouser as a major influence on his life. There is a lot of biological history here that I find quite fascinating.”
Just as Thomas Hunt Morgan was revolutionary in his approach to biological research and teaching, so Cassone hopes to lead the UK Department of Biology, starting first with the curriculum. “One of the major things I hope to do here is develop a completely new biology curriculum towards a more 21st century view of biology, and to better integrate the very dynamic aspects of biological research into our instruction,” Cassone said. “There has been a disconnect between what, in my view, is a very static, content-laden curriculum in biology all over the world and the very dynamic world of biological research.” He holds up a large textbook with the word “Biology” proclaimed in large letters on the front. “It’s full of facts. It’s too many facts for freshman biologists, let alone senior biologists, to really grasp, and all too often, biology curricula are an amazing array of trees without any concept of the forest.”
Biology is the largest major on UK’s campus, and Cassone hopes to implement new curriculum changes along with the planned university-wide changes in general education requirements in Fall 2010. “Biological science has been a compendium of facts, and has caused other scientific disciplines to rightly accuse biology of being a stamp collectors’ field,” said Cassone. The goal of the new biology curriculum is to improve the mathematics series for biology majors, hone in on the scientific principles, and give students the dynamic experience of lab research.
In that spirit, professor Ed Rucker is working with his cellular biology class to engage the subject matter rather than simply memorizing and regurgitating it through compelling class discussion and challenging exams that demand a strong working knowledge of the material. A Paducah native, Rucker met his wife Melissa at Murray State, and they both continued on to Texas A&M for graduate school and later academic jobs. When Cassone accepted the job at UK, it was a “natural move” for them both to come be a part of the department Cassone is working to shape.
“One of the driving forces is that we have a core of investigators here that we can collaborate with,” said Rucker, when asked what factors brought him and Melissa to UK. “We found an incredibly solid biology program already in place when we arrived and that was the primary draw. And also there’s the Markey Cancer Center and the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, which have direct application with what my lab is doing with cancer and cell death genes.”
Within Rucker’s lab is a collection of students who joined Cassone and Rucker in their migration from College Station, Texas. Anika Voisey is a first-year graduate student who worked in Rucker’s lab as a senior at Texas A&M. Voisey is a British citizen who moved to Texas during her junior year of high school. “Though I’m not a born and bred Texan, I’m definitely Texanized,” she laughed. The lab is almost entirely populated by ex-Aggies, either former undergraduates or transplanted graduate students. “We all made separate decisions to come to Kentucky and be part of the lab, but we are all glad that we’re together,” said Voisey. She and fellow lab partner Amber Hale are roommates and helped each other settle into a new state and a new university.
Graduate student Tom Gawriluk walks into Rucker’s lab wearing jeans and carrying a beaker full of foamy, yellow bacteria. The University of Illinois graduate completed one year of graduate school at Texas A&M before coming to Lexington. His eyes light up when he talks about studying genetics. “It’s extremely exciting to me. It’s all exploration and discovery,” he said, simultaneously channeling Lewis and Clark, and Louis Pasteur. “I’m a big nerd at heart.” One of the major advantages of working at UK is simply geography. “At A&M there were many different departments spread out all over and just within this building we have five or six model organisms.” Fellow biologists working with mice, yeast, worms, salamanders and crayfish are merely a short walk down a hallway.
For Cassone, coming to UK allowed him to take a fresh approach to his already formidable program of research. As a young researcher he found that over time his research proposals were built around what were supportable by funding agencies as much as what the data itself supported. “As a consequence, you incrementally drift toward things that may not be of your prime interest, but things that are fundable,” said Cassone. “I had enough confidence in myself to know that if I had the breathing space to develop a new research program using resources that the University of Kentucky has made available to me, that I can, over the course of years, convince funding agencies that this area is every bit or more interesting than the old area.”
If you’re looking for the simple explanation of Cassone’s research program, he studies biological clocks. And that’s where simple ends. “When I began this research as a young scholar I naively thought that the act of waking up and going to sleep was a simple enough behavior that you could understand it,” Cassone admits ruefully. “And though it’s taken some 30 to 50 years, we’re actually on the verge of being able to understand biological clocks.”
Cassone has three research projects underway at UK, each looking at different aspects of biological clocks. The first, overseen by Melissa Rucker, studies what biological clocks can tell us about bird song and its impact on language development and the capacity to grow new neurons. The second looks at the impact of biological clocks on bird migration, which has real human consequences in the spread of zoonotic diseases carried by migratory birds. Both bird labs are supported by the Ecological Research Facility built by the University of Kentucky in northern Fayette County; a facility that is already beginning to attract researchers who do similar work from all over the world. The third project is currently being set up to study how an independent biological clock of the bowel effects such modern ailments as colon cancer and inflammatory bowel syndrome.
One can feel in the very hum of the building the magnitude of every project being researched and the importance of training each student for the biological challenges they will encounter in the next century. “We are at the verge of a huge climatic change with far-reaching biological consequences,” Cassone said. “These changes will affect us down to the very plants we can grow in our backyards. As an academic discipline there are serious medical problems tied to climatic changes that biologists need to be training people to address, and yet, we’re not even thinking about those conflicts. We’re treating the symptoms. I think a biology department should be built with those things in mind.”
Group photo left to right: Dr. Edmund Rucker, Associate Professor; Dr. Vincent Cassone, Professor and Chair; Ms. Amber Hale, Graduate Student; Mr. Jiffin Paulose, Graduate Student; Mr. Thomas Gawriluk, Graduate Student; Mrs. Melissa Rucker, Research Associate; Mr. Dan Ledbetter, Graduate Student; Ms. Anika Voisey, Graduate Student