Yves Brun, the Distinguished Professor of Biology who will co-teach COLL-C105: “From Discovery to Practice: Putting Science into Action,” can explain what students will learn from the course in three words: “Science is fun.” That may sound like a simplistic take-away, especially coming from a celebrated microbiologist who heads his own lab. The Brun Lab conducts important research into questions about how bacteria age and how they organize their cells to take on characteristic shapes and perform functions like adhering to a surface.

Brun explains that he hopes students will leave the course understanding that, at its heart, “science is done by human beings who find it interesting and have fun doing it.” In his own case, he says, “after 23 years, I still find bacteria absolutely fascinating. One of the things I really like about bacteria is that you can find diversity and variation in very simple ways that allow you to ask basic questions about how a cell functions.”

Amit Hagar, who chairs the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science, will co-teach the course with Brun. Hagar, too, can sum up the course’s central thesis quite simply: “It takes a campus to produce a scientist.” Hagar means that “apart from biology courses and labs, science students need to learn about themselves as human beings and about other human beings.” Students must understand, he explains, that “science is not perfect; it’s done by human beings who have egos, and it has defects. But despite these, it’s the only way we’re going to be able to study nature.”

With Brun, the class will investigate another example, this one from biology. One weekend, biologist Salvador Luria, who taught at IU from 1943 to 1959, did an experiment that proved that bacteria mutate spontaneously and randomly. This simple experiment was a significant part of the reason he won a Nobel Prize in 1969. Luria’s idea for his experiment came to him while he was at a faculty dance at the Bloomington country club.

Brun will also talk about CRISPERs, which were discovered when scientists looked further into mutations. CRISPRs are a kind of acquired immunity system that protects bacteria from infection by viruses. They can now be used to edit human DNA and thus have the potential to treat the genetic causes of diseases like cancer.

Notions of randomness and change apply to the scientific careers of both Brun and Hagar. Brun originally thought he might become a novelist and a poet, though, as the son of a high school physics and chemistry teacher, he was always drawn to science as well. “When I really got into science,” he relates, “was when I got to do research in a lab as an undergraduate. That really changed my life. You do an experiment and you get a result and you realize, ‘Huh. I’m the only person in the world who knows this thing.’”

As for Hagar, five years ago, he began doing cancer research. The reminders his wife received about her yearly mammogram prompted him to start thinking about how screening schedules could be optimized if they were based on an understanding of how fast cancer cells grow. In turn, he theorized that the rate of growth is affected by aerobic fitness. Hagar has been conducting clinical trials and experiments with mice and publishing research papers with radiologists and a breast surgeon, as well as with cancer researchers on campus.

“I come to the course with the perspective of really putting science into action,” Hagar says. “Because I wasn’t trained as a biologist, I rely on collaborators who were. Watching them work, I have developed almost an anthropologist’s perspective on the scientific method. I try to analyze scientists’ modes of thought, and sometimes I suggest different methodologies and different experiments.”

Students in the course, who need not have any background in biology, will change as well. They will finish the course by doing a group project to design an experiment or come up with an hypothesis, which they will present to the class. As Hagar says, “We want to teach the 111 students in our class to think outside of the box, to think of new avenues to explore. And above all, we want them to become passionate about scientific research.”