On Monday, the school lunch hour was taken over by a visit from SciHigh, a program run out of the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital. The volunteers were two graduate students in the Department of Cell and Systems Biology at U of T. They came to our school to share their enthusiasm and love of science.
The SciHigh program was developed in the late 90s to promote science in schools across Toronto. The experiments that they demonstrate are intended to make science fun, and to expose young scholars to things that go beyond what is possible in most high school classrooms. For us, they brought several kinds of model organisms including, fruit flies, nematode worms and glow-in-the-dark mice!
A glowing mouse tail viewed through special glasses.
The mice had been transgenically modified to include either RFP or GFP, meaning that their tails and ears glowed in red or green when viewed through special glasses. Many of our grade 11 and 12 biology students have been learning about genetics and biotechnology in the past month, so this was a really unique opportunity. The facilitators talked about being a graduate student, their own research and why model organisms are so important. This discussion also touched on the ethics and responsibilities related to using model organisms in research.
The Abelard School 