“Daphnia,” Matt Weisberg told an inquiring reporter aboard a brightly painted bus parked on a lawn outside Foxfire School in Yonkers. We eyed a jumpy, wriggling creature doing a primitive dance on two computer screens wired to microscopes in a refitted city bus that, in another era, might have carried a commune-hopping hippie family across the country.
“It”™s a small freshwater crustacean,” Weisberg elaborated. The shrimp is its relative.
“You didn”™t know that?” Westchester County Executive Robert P. Astorino teased the inquiring reporter.
Astorino had stopped by to check out this mobile science lab, the BioBus, on one of its several stops this month at public schools and youth venues in the county. In the performance of official duty, he obligingly peered into a microscope in search of daphnia through its high-powered lens.
“Do you see anything?” Weisberg asked. The county executive muttered a yes, though not too convincingly.
“It”™s creepy,” said a boy in a sixth-grade class, watching the brown-bodied specimens gyrate Gangnam-style on the monitors.
“This kind of experience taps their creativity,” Iris Pagan, executive director of the Westchester County Youth Bureau, said outside the bus as another Foxfire class climbed aboard for a 45-miunte exploration of microscopic daphnia ”“ called water fleas in unscientific circles ”“ and students”™ own cheek cells. “You want them to have this kind of experience that”™s going to open their brains to ask questions about the world,” said Pagan.
The county youth bureau partnered with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. in Greenburgh, the state”™s largest biotechnology employer, to schedule a series of BioBus visits that have reached youths from Peekskill to Mount Vernon. The educational outreach especially targets communities and students with limited access to the donated scientific lab equipment aboard the bus, which in its youth did civic duty in that ancient capital of hippiedom, San Francisco. This was the gas-guzzling, solar-paneled lab”™s second stop on Foxfire”™s North Broadway campus.
Regeneron has been a BioBus sponsor since 2011, connecting it with more than 30 schools in Westchester and in the Albany area, where the company operates a manufacturing plant in Rensselaerville.
Regeneron spokesman Peter Dworkin in a press release described the company”™s deep commitment to advancing STEM, that increasingly oft-heard acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematical studies in which many American schools are found to be lagging. Dworkin said Regeneron especially promotes the S in STEM ”“ science education, “in order to deepen the pipeline of students prepared to compete and excel as our future workforce.”
“Companies, like Regeneron, that are driven by science have a responsibility and opportunity to address the STEM achievement gap,” he said. “We collaborate with educational organizations and government to increase the number of students excited, engaged and educated in STEM.”
Aboard the BioBus, staff scientists see that excitement in students engaged in hands-on and swab-your-mouth learning. From surveys of disembarking students, BioBus staff has noted a threefold increase in the number of those highly interested in a science career.
“We don”™t really have anyone but the students to answer to,” BioBus worker Matt Weisberg said between classes in Yonkers. “So we can make it about them. At the end of the day, they are our judges.”
Weisberg grew up in Scarsdale and New Rochelle and last year earned an undergraduate degree from Brown University, where he majored in computational biology. Last September, he followed his older sister, Sarah, aboard the BioBus as an employee.
In a curtained rear compartment, Weisberg led a Socratic lesson in cellular identity as students”™ cheek cells floated outsized on a large flat screen connected to the bus”™ most powerful microscope
“Ooh, that”™s nasty,” one boy said as he watched isolated human cells randomly mix and mingle on screen.
“No it”™s not!” said a scolding girl, perhaps a budding scientist, who had volunteered her cells for the demonstration.
“The idea that we are the teamwork of billions of living organisms working together is a very difficult idea to grasp,” Weisberg told us. “That”™s what I love to talk about ”“ connections between things that seem different.”
At 24, Weisberg is too young to drive the BioBus without its owner paying a hefty insurance premium. The driving is chiefly left to BioBus founder Ben Dubin-Thaler, who rolled out the GMC rig and educational concept in 2007 and who runs it through his New York City nonprofit, Cell Motion Laboratories Inc.
On the day we learned about daphnia, Dubin-Thaler had parked the bus in Yonkers and hurried back to New York City, where he and staff are preparing a major expansion of their mission with the opening of a stationary lab, Bio Base, on the Lower East Side. It will train BioBus volunteers and offer professional development classes for teachers. It will also be a place where students can follow up on their initial eye-opening experience aboard the bus, he told us over the phone.
Arriving in New York as an undergraduate at Columbia University, Dubin-Thaler saw the disparity between people with access to “a very good education” and those who lack that opportunity. “That bothered me the whole time I was at Columbia,” he said, “but I never knew what to do about it.”
Pursuing a doctoral degree in cell biophysics at Columbia, Dubin-Thaler noticed that visitors to his lab with no professed interest in science ”“ the janitor on his floor was one ”“ “would get really excited about what they saw under the microscope.” He saw the power of “hands-on experience” in sparking an interest in scientific learning.
“The bus just kind of popped into my head,” he said. It was a convenient way to bring his research lab to students.
Dubin-Thaler knew the bus model that he wanted for his venture ”“ a GMC transit bus known as The Fishbowl ”“ and went searching for it online. “The first link that popped up was Craigslist South Dakota,” he said.
A family there had converted a 1974 bus into a recreational vehicle with solar panels on its roof. In a previous life, it had carried Golden Gate Transit passengers across the San Francisco bridge.
Dubin-Thaler paid $15,000 for it, and BioBus was born.
“On a good day, it”™s getting about six miles to the gallon, seven if we”™re really lucky,” he said.
Dubin-Thaler and other staff scientists on board, such as Sarah Weisberg, have set aside their career plans to become university professors engaged in laboratory research in their fields.
“There are lots and of smart people doing research right now,” said Dubin-Thaler. “There aren”™t a lot of smart people figuring out new ways in science education.”
With six years on the road, the BioBus has nearly 350 educational stops “all over the country, but mostly in the New York metropolitan area,””™ he said. It has hosted nearly 80,000 youths, many of them from low-income neighborhoods in the boroughs and Westchester.
“There”™s not a lot of educational interventions that have the numbers that we do,” he said. “From the very beginning, what really made it work was the donations we received” from corporations. An early sponsor, Olympus Microscopes, donated the first high-tech equipment, “the same kind of microscope I use in the lab” at Columbia.
At Regeneron, “They”™ve been just amazing,” said the BioBus founder and chief driver. “This is not just a publicity thing for them. They are just committed to scientific education. That”™s what really comes first for them.”
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