The age of wonder

The photos portrayed a typical scene of science students doing an experiment. One photo showed four of them in a huddle on the floor with papers everywhere. One female was holding her hands to her head seemingly pondering a puzzle that three of her male co-experimenters were telling her while mulling over pieces of paper. In the other photos were diagrams and a matrix of numbers and variables. In the story that accompanied the photos, it mentioned that the students also followed their professor to a pub after their experiment was over which was again typical of life in grad school.

Sure, all of these pointed to a typical scene in the life of science students in grad school. Typical except that the students were a bunch of eight- to 10-year-old kids from a primary school in Devon, England. And this week, they just had their study published in a prestigious science journal that are normally reserved only for adults who are professional scientists, or those doing grad or post-grad work in the sciences.

The study appeared in the journal Biology Letters and the experimenters were 25 kids from the Blackawton Primary School.

Three years ago, the neuroscientist-father of one of the kids, Beau Lotto, went to his kid’s school to share with the kids that “science is nothing more than a game” since it makes us pose a question and then figure out ways to answer it. For two months, they had the kids ask questions that intrigued them the most. Eventually, the question that the kids wanted to pursue zeroed in on buff-tailed bumblebees and how these bees recognize the flowers from which they can suck the goodies.

The kids did all of the work with only light supervision from the adult scientist and headmaster. They used a design using slots made of plexiglass which served as the substitute “flowers.” They devised different patterns consisting of two colors, yellow and blue, for these “flowers” and added sugar water for the center slots and had the bees go to these “flowers.” The next step was to remove the sugary slots at the center while maintaining the colored patterns. Their findings revealed that the bees recognized and remembered which “flower” contained the sugary water by learning the patterns. Furthermore, the bees still went for the same slots even when the sugary water was removed.

Then, Lotto took the kids to a pub where he had to explain to them how to write a paper for submission for publication in a scientific journal. It took 18 months of convincing other scientists to take the paper seriously and review it. But in the end, it was the content that convinced the reviewers to have the paper published. The paper was written by the kids which echoed their voices and the diagrams included their hand-drawn matrices in colored pencils. In the abstract of their paper, the kids wrote of their discovery about how bees learn how to pick the best flower to suck from but they also wrote: “We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before.”

In my first term in grad school, I had a class that involved pond work. I remember being very nervous like the rest since our professor did not tell us what he expected us to demonstrate. I cannot spontaneously name a pond organism even if you have a truck of chocolate waiting for me as a reward. So with our collecting basins, we filtered all the wiggling and floating things that came our way. And soon, we were all roaring with curiosity and fascination when we got out of the pond to the nearby picnic table and when we put those things under our handheld microscopes. We were so noisy that we sounded like a kindergarten class who were just given instructions to a new game we had to play. Then our professor called our attention and pressed the playback button of a recorder we did not even know he had. Then we heard a recording of ourselves, all buzzing with questions and laughing at our confusions and fascination. Then our professor said something like this: This is what a PhD is all about. It is about child-like wonder and curiosity and the zest to find things out. Other people will tell you later that a PhD is about this and that but lose this wonder, and you lose more than a PhD.

That statement struck me like a big paddle that sliced the still water and stuck with me like those leeches in that pond. It is also what makes me sad and angry when I see kids already robbed of their sense of wonder and curiosity by a limiting curriculum or teacher or society. It is also what puzzles me about adult PhDs who have gained their bragging rights and lost their sense of wonder. But most of all, it is what keeps me writing these columns and hounding whoever plays a part, aware or not, in the science of our lives.

The Blackawton kids and their bees tolled the bells of curiosity and wonder, reminding us all that the hunger to understand lurks in each of us, regardless of age. May we all remember to feed it, now and all year-round.

Happy New Year to all of you.

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