Frontiers Summer 1999

Boot camp for 'brainiacs'

Itasca offers total immersion for neuroscience grad students.

By Deane Morrison

Except for living in fear of poison ivy, Lisa Johanek thoroughly enjoyed her first six weeks at the University of Minnesota. Except for dropping a canoe on her foot--on her birthday, no less--Therissa Libby enjoyed it too. Such experiences are par for the course at the Lake Itasca Forestry and Biological Station, where new neuroscience graduate students get large doses of lab experience, wilderness, and camaraderie, all crammed into six intensive summer weeks.

Now 13 years old, the Itasca graduate course in neuroscience is modeled after its more famous summer-institute cousins in Woods Hole (Mass.) and Cold Spring Harbor (Long Island). While it lacks an ocean, the program offers the wilds of Itasca State Park and the clear waters of Lake Itasca, the source of a pretty big river. It also offers something the 14 students in every new class seem to value above all else: the chance to get to know each other, as well as University neuroscience faculty and guest faculty from around the country. Drawing on faculty from such fields as psychology, chemistry, and engineering as well as biological sciences, the course is truly interdisciplinary, says physiology professor Richard Poppele, who is entering his ninth year as course director.

By starting out all neuroscience grad students at Itasca, the course gets students from diverse backgrounds "on the same page with respect to the experimental approach" and establishes a strong esprit de corps in each year's class, says Poppele.

But why hold a neuroscience "boot camp" at Itasca, instead of on the Twin Cities campus?

"Students get 100 percent attention of the faculty," explains Poppele. "In the Twin Cities, there are too many distractions, and I'm not sure we could find the space to do it in the same way."

Neuroscience department head Tim Ebner, who directed the course for its first five years, puts it a different way: "Our goal was to give students an intense introduction to laboratory science in a charming place. Š Faculty can immerse themselves with students--that's its beauty and its power. The students come from a wide variety of backgrounds, so the course is a leveler."

"I think it's helped us get through the first year," says Libby. "We got used to supporting each other." At Itasca, the neuroscience students eat together in the dining hall and sleep in shared cabins. They get hands-on experience with classic experiments in the field of neuroscience, using state-of-the-art equipment. The course runs five days a week, from 8 a.m. to nearly 6 p.m., when the dinner bell rings. Students and faculty return to continue experiments after dinner, sometimes working into the wee hours of the morning.

Each of the six weeks covers a separate subject area and is taught by its own team of faculty. The first three days of the week are devoted to learning new techniques; the last two days, students work in pairs, applying the techniques to their own projects. A weekly lecture series brings in top researchers. Last summer, neurosurgery assistant professor Janet Vargo was among them.

"She works on hemispheric neglect," says Johanek, who worked in Vargo's lab spring quarter. "That's where a lesion prevents the brain from processing information from senses on the contralateral [opposite] side of the body. For example, a stroke on one side could keep the brain from processing information from the opposite hand. Dr. Vargo is studying how to prevent or cure neglect.

"I think being at Itasca helped me develop a great interest in electrophysiology. The course made you focus in several areas, so you had to learn things that maybe you would've avoided."

For Libby, much of the thrill came from performing classic experiments and watching things happen just as they did in the textbooks. "One thing I did that I had read about was to make a microelectrode and stick it in a nerve cell body," says Libby. The cell was the T cell of a leech, a cell that responds to external stimuli.

"After inserting the microelectrode, we stroked the skin and watched the action potentials (waves of nerve electrical activity) march across the oscilloscope screen."

Then there was the hop toad experiment. Poppele recalls a week devoted to study of the interface where messages are passed from nerves to muscles--the neuromuscular junction. The instructor was University neurologist Christopher Gomez, an expert on toxins that affect the junction. Knowing that some frogs and toads secrete powerful nerve poisons, the class wiped off a hop toad's back and tested whatever substances had been collected. Sure enough, says Poppele, they found that something from the toad acted to specifically block transmission of signals across the nerve-muscle junction.

The course takes place in a simple one-story building; through the windows on one side, one can catch glimpses of Lake Itasca. Ebner jokes that neuroscientists at the station are considered the weird ones because they stay inside all the time. But the students find time to hike, bike, boat, and otherwise enjoy the lake and its forested surroundings. Many a night is spent lying on the dock, watching the northern lights. Johanek spent one afternoon walking the 17-mile path around the wishbone-shaped lake with a fellow student.

For his part, Ebner would like to see the neuroscience program have more space and new equipment, especially in the area of molecular neuroscience, which requires relatively sophisticated technology. And the student "barracks" could also use a face lift, he says. The course sometimes has "guest" graduate students: An exchange program with the Karolinska Institute has brought several Swedish students to Itasca, and graduate programs from other American and Canadian universities have also sent students. But no matter where they come from, Poppele says all seem to have a good time.

"I've never heard a complaint about the academic value in terms of getting a real orientation to neuroscience," he says.

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