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For many people, a late-summer infestation of fruit flies in the home can be an annoyance. But this summer, several students at a North Dakota university see the insect in a different light.
David Ronderos, associate professor of biology at the University of Mary in Bismarck, oversaw a cohort of undergraduates who spent 10 weeks doing research on Drosophila melanogaster – the common fruit fly.
Their quest? To find a cure for human blindness.
Whether or not they found that cure, one thing seems clear: They discovered a number of things about vision, about science, and about their own vocations.
Ronderos co-founded and directs the SURVE program – the Summer Undergraduate Research Vocation Experience at U Mary, as the school is known locally. SURVE provides paid science-research internship experiences to undergraduates while promoting an understanding of “science as vocation.”
The name of the program, which a student suggested in its first summer, 2017, mimics the SURF program that’s popular in many schools – the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship.
“Ours is a vocations experience,” Ronderos told Aleteia. “We wanted to make it somewhat similar to opportunities that are at other places, like the SURF programs or the REU programs that you get through the National Science Foundation or through the National Institutes of Health. But we wanted also to give it something more, and give it a U Mary, Benedictine flavor.”
The university dates back to 1959, when the Benedictine Sisters of the Annunciation opened Mary College. Today the institution enrolls some 3,800 students and offers nearly 60 undergraduate majors and a range of master's and doctoral degrees.
Working on their own
In SURVE, students design and perform their own experiments; experience an intentional and authentic scientific community; learn about the nature of science and the vocation of the scientist; and prepare for graduate, medical, or professional school.
Students begin by working on guided projects under the supervision of a faculty member. After building the skills and learning the strategies they need to perform successful laboratory research, they gain increasing levels of independence.
In addition to doing research, participants think and learn about science in a broader context of faith, reason, and life: How can you follow God as a scientist? How do you see your work in science as a service to others? How do you balance scientific endeavors and family life? What does the ethical framework of a Catholic scientist look like?
Many participants enter the program with a misconception that scientists largely work alone, but during their 10 weeks on campus, they become part of a community, even if they work in different labs. They have opportunities to attend Mass and share meals together and share ideas, insights, and perspectives with one another.
“We're guiding them in faculty-mentored research projects where they're performing experiments, generating data, analyzing and interpreting their data, presenting it, using it, presenting it in different formats,” Ronderos explained. “We also do journal clubs where they'll read scientific literature, and then present and discuss the scientific literature with one another.”
Students in all the labs do a set of common readings and come together in a seminar to discuss topics related to being a scientist and understanding science as a way of living out one's Christian calling.
“We explore themes like the harmony of faith and reason, the integration of faith and work, and balance between all these considerations that you have as you're trying to live out your life and your calling as a Christian and a scientist at the same time,” said Ronderos. “We talk about ethics, and that includes research ethics, but also more of a step back kind of look from a Catholic perspective on an ethical framework for why we do science and the way that we do science, and we think about the role of science in society. We also talk about discernment and vocation. How do you know when you're called to do something? What are the ways that God speaks to you in your life?”
The beauty of science
Ronderos’s lab focuses on the characterization of genes in the visual system. The fruit fly is used to identify genes required for vision.
“We break genes in the fruit fly, and then we can record from their eyes to see if the flies go blind, and we can put the genes back in to see if they can recover their sight,” he said. “We can even take a human version of a gene and put that into the fly and see if it'll sub in and replace the missing fly gene. And if it does the same job, that's one indication that whatever we're seeing in the fly, it probably also happens in human eyes. Even though they look so different, they're very similar on a molecular and cellular level. And so the discoveries we make in the fly can have direct connections on how we can develop new therapies for treating blindness in humans.”
The three students in his lab this summer learned to perform various techniques, including Electrophysiology, DNA isolation, and CRISPR experimental design.
About a dozen students worked in three other faculty-led labs, looking at things like brewer's yeast’s potential in DNA repair and electrochemical gradients of cancer cells.
“Cancer cells have been known to have different voltage, different membrane potential, compared to non-cancerous cells, and this affects their proliferation rates,” Ronderos said.
Serving people through research
Simon Bowden, a biology major from Fargo, North Dakota, worked in that lab, studying cancer cells under Professor Joseph Beggane. The experience helped Bowden decide to transition from a pre-med program to research.
“I had thought I could help people a lot more as a doctor,” he told Aleteia. “But as I went through SURVE and I was hearing about Dr. Ronderos' group and their work on blindness and Dr. [Wendy] Larson's group and their work on DNA repair and Dr. [John] Boyle's group and their work on epigenetics, and our group on how cancer works, it all really clicked for me that while it is not like an immediate ‘I do this experiment and I help a person,’ results come down the road.
"All of the research that we're doing is so important for understanding mechanisms of how things work, which is what everything is built upon: ‘How do I get this to work? How do I get it to stop working?’ And throughout this research job, I've had first-hand experience that it is not only super important, it's also extremely fun to get this new data and to interpret it and to figure out, ‘Well, this drug worked like this on this cell, which means these are the possibilities of what it's doing.’ And then to go one by one with further experiments like, ‘Okay, we did another experiment and this happened, so we can rule this one out, and to just narrow it down to a specific mechanism.’ That's very fulfilling in itself.”
Even having the experience of not making any new discovery is valuable – as a kind of process of elimination, Bowden learned.
“We had a hypothesis about what our cells were doing, and then throughout the 10 weeks of testing, we basically found out that we were wrong,” he said. “And that is another beautiful thing about science: in finding out that we were wrong, we made another step in basically figuring out this is not how it works.”
The first to know
While his lab did not make any positive discoveries, Bowden learned that in Ronderos' lab, students found “a bunch of human genes that would be potential rescues for these flies, to rescue them from blindness, and one of the genes did something that they didn't expect.”
Ronderos himself declined to elaborate, saying he’s not quite ready to publish the findings.
“We're continuing a project that we've been following pretty closely now for about four summers,” he said. “Since about 2020, we started making some really neat discoveries, and then we've been doing follow-up experiments, and we're right now getting close to where we're going to publish it.”
But, he said, “I’m not going to show my cards yet.”
In any case, his students got a good taste of what it’s like to do science.
“In SURVE, we're actually letting the student do the science now, so instead of us asking the questions, they're the ones who are asking the questions by doing the experiment, and then when they see the data before even I see it, they're the ones who know first the answer to that question, and that's a really exciting, thrilling experience for a student, to be the first one to know something about how the universe works, and then to go and tell your faculty about it, and to then have the job of sharing that with the world. That's really exciting.”
Said Ronderos, “I think that's where people really start to discover their way and the excitement in doing science.”
