It started out as just another busy day on the job. I tried to collect my thoughts as a bunch of excited 5-year-olds careened through the exhibit rooms, yelping and screeching, trailed by their harried parents. I was an intern at the Kohl Children's Museum in Wilmette, Ill., presenting science projects twice a week to its young patrons. Today's session was to be a lesson in basic genetics.
As a junior biology major and aspiring science journalist, I figured I could handle explaining genetics to preschoolers. I surveyed the gathering crowd settling onto their cushions on the floor in front of me. They seemed like ordinary kids. What I didn't know was that one of them was about to teach me the most important principle of imparting scientific knowledge.
I started by introducing Oscar, a 4-foot-tall monster I had drawn on white paper and taped to the wall. It was our job to color in Oscar's horns, eyes and spots. But to do that, we had to interpret a special alphabetical code posted on the wall next to him. Each four-letter "word" in the code corresponded to a different color, to the genetic code that dictates human development.
"OK, everybody," I called out above the din. "Who wants to be the first to color Oscar?" Half the kids raised their hands and rushed toward the monster. "How about you first," I said, choosing a cherubic-faced girl. "What's your name?"
"Sarah," she answered.
"The horns," she said, grabbing a green marker from my box. But wait, I thought, she's supposed to read the genetic code and color the monster according to the instructions. The code clearly specified red horns.
"Hold on," I said. "What color does the code say to use in Oscar's horns?" I pointed to the instruction sheet and searched Sarah's eyes for some hint of understanding. She just stared at me without saying a word. I felt a pang of panic. Despite the noise of the bustling kids and their chatting parents, I heard only Sarah's silence.
That's when it hit me: Sarah had no idea what I was talking about. In fact, most of these kids didn't. How could they be expected to? Thousands of years had passed before human beings formulated the idea of a gene, a tiny biochemical structure that determines every human characteristic from how many arms we have to what color our eyes are. I'd been studying it since high school, yet here I was trying to force-feed the concept to these kids in two minutes. I had forgotten that it is impossible to understand if you don't care about what a gene is in the first place.
I swallowed and thought for a second. "Sarah, do you know why your hair is brown and not blue?" She looked at me, green marker still in hand, wondering what that had to do with Oscar. "Well, the reason is that little chemicals in your body tell your hair what color to make itself. Your body doesn't want you to have blue hair, or green hair. Your body wants you to have brown hair. So what color do the chemicals in your body tell your hair to be?"
"Brown," she said. Contact! She was with me. All I had to do was like hers, and that the paper on the wall told us what color Oscar's chemicals wanted his horns to be. The key, I realized as I went on with the explanation, was to make genetics relevant to Sarah so that she would be interested in learning about it. Once she understood, Sarah traded her green marker for a red one and carefully filled in Oscar's horns.
I think about Sarah almost every time I write a science story for the Stanford Daily. She showed me that scientific knowledge means more than just learning biology on my terms. If I hope to share my interpretation of the world, I have to meet people in the context of what matters to them. It sounds like a simple concept. Maybe that's why it took a 5-year-old to explain it to me.
Erika Check, '99, is a biology major from Wilmette, Ill.
