One of the hottest majors in the College of Letters & Science might involve a few sore fingers. Just watch Matt Stachowski (Biology, x’16), as he plunges one hand into an aquarium, where a bright red crayfish scuttles backwards.
"He's going to pinch you," someone warns.
"No, I'm grabbing where he can't reach me," says Stachowski, nabbing the crayfish from behind. But the scarlet critter writhes free, dropping back with a splash.
"You know what I love?" Stachowski says with a wry grin, turning to his chuckling lab-mates. "The smell of crayfish in the morning."
The opportunity to learn how the brain's nerve cells are born, grow and connect makes slippery moments like this one worthwhile for juniors and seniors like Stachowski who want to study neuroscience.
Fueled by President Obama's $300 million BRAIN Initiative, which supports innovative research around emerging neurotechnologies, this rapidly expanding field is drawing students from many disciplines, including mathematics, physics, computer science, psychology, engineering, and medicine.
The demand for the "Neurobiology Option" offered as part of the biology major has skyrocketed since it was first offered in 2005. Averaging close to 300 students enrolled each year, the program is currently beyond capacity, with undergraduates lining up to get into neurobiology labs like this one, added this spring and taught by zoology Professor Tony Stretton, neuroscience Professor Peter Lipton and neurology Professor Corinna Burger. Many neurobiology students end up taking labs in other disciplines, such as ecology, to meet their requirement.
A new proposal in the works would help meet this demand by launching a neurobiology major in the Department of Zoology. The proposal is currently moving through a campus-wide approval process with the hopes of launching in fall 2016.
"An official major will finally put this program on sound footing and make it sustainable for the future," says Lipton. "Students would much rather have a major than an option. It enables them to do more neuroscience, and makes them more relevant to employers, graduate schools and medical schools."
The Department of Zoology has "stepped up" to provide much-needed infrastructure and support, says Lipton. But he notes that despite the past lack of a departmental home and no funding for teaching assistants and equipment, professors worked hard to find equipment for laboratories and build rapport among students.
"These students know they have been part of a pioneering neuroscience effort on campus," he says. "They call themselves 'the neuro kids.'"
After capturing their crayfish, the "neuro kids" in Stretton's lab plunge the skittish research subjects into coolers of crushed ice and turn their attention to the blackboard, where Stretton scrawls the complex equation they'll need for their experiment. Today they are measuring lambda, or how fast a signal decays along a cell membrane — a fundamental step in studying neurons and their behavior.
"I was told there would be no math," deadpans Stachowski, as the trigonometric equation grows ever longer.
But it's not the math that's intimidating to these undergraduates — they've mastered most of it in prior courses. What they're really learning is how to conduct experiments, which Stretton says "requires a different intelligence."
"This lab is a critical step from learning about science, to actually doing science," says Stretton. "Science is based on experiments. To do experiments you have to learn the relevant techniques, if they exist, or devise new ones, if they do not. They will develop competence and confidence."
Joe Wirtz (Biology, x’16) and his lab partner, Cindy Zhang (Computer Sciences and Biology, x’16) huddle over their slice of crayfish tail under the high-powered microscope. They're poised to stimulate a cell with micro-electrodes (like tiny hypodermic needles), but Joe is momentarily confused: which electrode delivers the stimulus? And which one records the response?
Cindy's job, meanwhile, is to find the measuring device — "the little ruler thing-y."
"Micrometer scale," whispers Stretton, gliding past. He wants lab partners to work together to figure things out, but he's adamant that they develop familiarity with instruments such as the micrometer, the micromanipulator, and the micro-electrodes that students poke into cells.
"What you are doing today is very demanding," he tells the class. "I really want you to be competent at it."
After they're through with crayfish, students will have two more 5-week modules where they'll examine synaptic transmissions in rat hippocampal slices, as well as how the learning behavior of rats is influenced by Parkinson's disease.
By the end of the course, they will have progressed from carrying out specified experiments, to devising an original short project on their own. That's the essence of the scientific laboratory method, and adding more labs like this one will make UW-Madison a stand-out choice for many potential neuroscience majors.
Brain scientists are achieving remarkable breakthroughs in areas as diverse as obesity, stroke, dementia, Parkinson's, epilepsy, and many more challenging disease studies. Today, for these undergraduate students, it's crayfish. In ten years, it may be a cure for Alzheimer's.