Beth Brainerd / Lila Gierasch / Table of Contents / Home
by Elizabeth Luciano '86, '96G
Biologist Beth Brainerd has an unusual officemate. He resides in a glass terrarium at the foot of her desk, and he ruffles his collar, called a "dewlap," when faced with a figurine he views as a rival. He's an iguana: a yard-long, grayish-green lizard.
"It's nice to have the critters around," says Brainerd happily, motioning around her lab, a bright and spacious area on the second floor of Morrill Science Center that she shares with about two dozen fellow animals, mostly reptiles and amphibians. A fish kite hangs from the ceiling, and a vine climbs a pipe to the ceiling. Posters detailing Brainerd's work in animal biomechanics stand nearby.
Though Brainerd delights in these "critters," it's clear they're not pets. Her interest is intellectual, and she delights as well in sharing that interest, in calling attention to animals that are particularly striking.
She points out a dark-green guy with bright yellow markings: a tiger salamander, native to North Carolina. "He's pretty dramatic-looking," she says admiringly. She stops to check on a monitor lizard. "Very prehistoric-looking, aren't they?"
Behind a heavy metal door in the lab's "cold room," an enclosure the size and temperature of a meat locker, resides another North Carolinian, a hellbender salamander. Members of this tribe look as if they're made of brown rock. They have fingers, toes, and two respiratory systems. (Hellbenders live in water and prefer to breathe through their skin. But if the water isn't clean or cool enough, they'll rise to the surface and take a breath through their nostrils instead.) "Isn't he great?" asks Brainerd.
Then there's a larval tiger salamander that will grow to look like the green-and-yellow adult. You'd never know it now: this lumpish, four-inch-long creature is translucent, and has what looks like a feathery mane around its neck. External gills, says Brainerd.
Brainerd holds up the iguana who is her officemate. "This guy, when he runs, bends his body from side to side," she says, imitating the effects of the animal's loping, ungainly stride. "He uses his chest muscles for both running and breathing, so he's unable to run and breathe at the same time. They run and stop, then run and stop. It's a skittering type of locomotion. What they're doing is stopping to breathe." (Brainerd notes that this observation, like many new scientific findings, remains somewhat controversial among researchers. She and colleague Tomasz Owerkowicz suspect that the differing results are due to researchers studying different species of lizards).
Brainerd's specialty is biomechanics. "It's really just what it sounds like," she says. "It's mechanical engineering with a biology twist." Applied to humans, Brainerd's discipline would be sports medicine.
Her specific take on biomechanics, however, is evolution. Her most recent work focuses on breathing in lizards, such as iguanas and monitor lizards, and salamanders, which are amphibians. "I want to understand, from a mechanical point of view, how the animals work, and how they evolved," she says. "If you want to understand biology, you have to understand evolution."
It's a topic that has held her interest since childhood vacations on Cape Cod, when she would examine snails and fish at the water's edge. "I was always very curious about the natural world," she says. As a youngster, she read about marine organisms, and as a graduate student at Harvard, studied fish, amphibians and reptiles. "I guess you could say there was an evolution of interests," says Brainerd, fiddling with a fish-shaped pen.
Brainerd spent a portion of her growing-up years in Amherst; she and her sister attended the Wildwood and Fort River schools while her parents, Lyman '73G and Susan '71G, were graduate students at UMass. "I think it had a big impact on me, growing up in a house full of books, understanding the academic world from the start. I knew what it meant to be a graduate student and what it meant to be a faculty member." Lyman Brainerd became an administrator at Princeton. Susan Brainerd went on to administrative and fundraising posts for such groups as American Ballet Theater, the Big Apple Circus, and the New York Philharmonic. .
"My mother is really smart, a go-getter, she's very energetic and confident," says Beth Brainerd. "I have tremendous respect for my mother. She's a woman who does things for herself and doesn't make any excuses." Brainerd's father's influence was intellectual, she says: "He really taught me the value of reading and writing and ideas."
Although family members are now scattered across the country, Brainerd says that to her and her husband, a lawyer, their Leverett acreage "feels like home."
No one else had ever studied the mechanics of breathing in salamanders. That was part of the attraction, says Brainerd. "I have no desire to work in a crowded field. I'd rather be a pioneer." And being a pioneer has brought with it the delight and the pressure of unanticipated results.
The traditional dogma was that salamanders were capable of only passive exhalation, that their lungs simply empty like deflating balloons and are refilled by a pump-like action of the mouth. The significance of the assumption is that mouth-based breathing is more "primitive," chest-based breathing more developed, in evolutionary terms.
"I certainly did not expect to find salamanders actively squeezing air out of their lungs with their body muscles," recalls Brainerd. Finding out otherwise required surgical implantation of tiny sensors into the animals' chests. Using a technology known as electromyography literally "electricity-muscle-picture" Brainerd made readings showing clearly that salamanders can use their muscles to exhale.
Brainerd has thus demonstrated that these animals are "at an evolutionary midpoint," in which they use both kinds of breathing. "It's very unusual to find the two types in one animal," she says. "It's rare." It's as though nature, in the salamander, has provided an evolutionary freeze-frame.
"I was surprised and very pleased," says Brainerd. In fact she was so surprised that she was initially resistant to her findings. "I kept thinking that maybe I'd put the pressure sensor in the wrong place. But by the second or third animal, I knew the results were correct."
A gray-and-white figure appears on the computer screen: a full-length image of a monitor lizard in profile, courtesy of X-ray videography. The creature's legs move elegantly and precisely. "You can look inside and see what's happening with lungs and bones," says Brainerd. She points out the shadowy ribs, the backbone, the eye, the arm. A dark spot about the size of a quarter is the heart.
The lizard could teach the iguana a thing or two, like how to run and breathe at the same time. An iguana in a hurry is obliged, says Brainerd, to "Run, stop, breathe. Run, stop, breathe." The monitor lizard, by contrast, has a salamander-like ability to breathe in more than one way. While its chest muscles diverted from breathing duty to bend the body, the large mouth goes into action to push in air. "He has a mouth and throat cavity he uses like a bicycle pump," says Brainerd. "He's squeezing air down into the lungs."
In shadowy figure on the screen, a large white space appears: the animal's mouth. A second later the space shrinks, and a thick white line forms along the base of the belly. That's air being forced from mouth to lungs. That's what a breath looks like.
Brainerd uses video cameras that can record a thousand frames per second. ("Some of those breaths are really fast," she says.) She analyzes the images with an eye toward numerous factors: stride distances, angles, areas, motion analysis.
Balancing administrative tasks with research can be tricky, she says. And traditional roles and mores make it difficult for women, particularly, to stake out and protect the time necessary for quality research.
"I think that, for cultural reasons, women tend to be more conscientious about their commitments," Brainerd says. "We tend to be more invested in meeting obligations imposed by other people." Sitting on search committees, for instance, or screening applicants for graduate programs.
Still, she says, she's encouraged to see the numbers of women in science creeping up. "It's a huge difference for a young woman, having a female professor. They think, 'That could be me.' Men get that affirmation all the time." And working in labs can be transforming for young women, she says: "They get a sense that they can do anything or be anything."
Which is not to say it's easy. Brainerd's own day generally begins at four a.m., when she rises to do some writing in her home office. She's on campus by ten to meet students and colleagues, teach, and conduct research. The day's work seldom ends before seven in the evening. Her teaching duties include 500-level courses in comparative physiology and comparative vertebrate anatomy, and occasional one-credit seminars.
One exercise she sets for her students is designing imaginary animals and creating their physiological systems. "Physiological reasoning is a way of understanding conceptually how animals work," says Brainerd. "It's a lot more than learning facts, and saying, 'These parts make up an animal.' It involves creativity and rigorous thinking. So if a student has an aquatic insect, I might say, 'Fine. Where does it get its oxygen?' That's really what physiologists do. They create a hypothesis about how an animal works."
Brainerd laughs at certain myths about scientists. "There's a perception that we're very cool and very collected, but actually, we're very uncool and uncollected, because we care so much about our corner of the world," she says. "Scientists are among the most intense and passionate people I know; particularly about the things they're curious about."
She also rejects the perception that science is uncreative.
She turns to a gecko. It's gray, with rust-colored spots. This one is small, just a few inches long, living in a small plastic container.
Brainerd turns the container upside-down. The animal sticks effortlessly to the surface. This, she says, may be her next project, after the work on breathing mechanics is complete.
"The biomechanics of adhesion is fascinating," she says. "The gecko has pads on his toes. They're little lines that look like the bottom of a sneaker. But if you look at them under a microscope, they don't look like lines. There are hundreds of thousands of hairlike structures, down to a micron. There's no gluey substance; the feet are dry."
She pauses, looking at the small creature standing calmly upside-down on the sheer plastic surface.
"Nobody really knows how they do it."
Lila Gierasch sets out an artist's painting of an amorphous pink blob, and traces with her finger the path of a thin white ribbon curling through it. "It turns a corner here, then does a sort of spiral staircase, then turns and does another spiral here."
The pink blob is a cell, and the ribbon represents a protein within it. Gierasch's research centers around how proteins fold within cells. If the ribbon fails to curve into a specific shape, the cell won't be able to fulfill its function.
"There's a lot going on inside a cell," she muses. "It's a cluttered environment. So many processes have to happen, from reproduction to the export of proteins. What I want to know is how that happens with fidelity."
The potential for chaos within a cell and the ways in which chaos is averted and order allowed to reign could be an analogy for an academic department. In Gierasch's case, it's the chemistry department, which she chairs.
In her office on the south side of Lederle Graduate Research Tower, charts with jagged lines her latest research results are pinned to the wall. Books and files are piled on tables and desks. A bicycle Gierasch's ride to work waits in one corner. The sense is busy, energetic, and orderly. "I have an organizational gene I can't help but express, and I guess it expressed itself."
Just shy of the three-year anniversary of her appointment, Gierasch confesses that the position of UMass chemistry chair was initially less than appealing. "When I heard about the opening, I said, 'Someone would have to be crazy to
Yet despite the challenges before it, "it was clear that the department could flourish. There are good, smart people here, doing good work. And they are very loyal to the institution." The deciding factor, Gierasch says, was the university's genuine respect for teaching.
"That meant something to me, because I love to teach," she says. "People here really care about undergraduate education, which matters because chemistry is such a central discipline." The undergraduates in introductory chemistry classes may be heading toward such fields as biochemistry or engineering, and they need a solid foundation in some very complex material. "It's our mission to do a good job teaching those undergraduates," says Gierasch. "Some people might see it as a burden, but we see it as an opportunity."
It can be hard, she acknowledges, for scholars to leave their historical niches, to give up turf; humans have a tendency toward territorialism, and those who don't exhibit it can meet with skepticism. This has on occasion happened to Gierasch. She has done the unthinkable and offered space to other departments. One researcher to whom she offered a new lab reacted suspiciously, saying he'd already been moved several times.
"It takes a lot for people to believe you don't have a hidden agenda. You have to dare to believe that if you help somebody, maybe they will help you in the future."
If the future holds increased feelings of trust and collaboration, Gierasch is hoping it will also include greater numbers of women in science. It's a topic close to her heart: she's one of a very small number of female chemistry department heads in the country. And she "firmly believes" in role models, she says. "Whether it's parents or a neighbor or a teacher, it changes your sense of your own capabilities."
She adds, however, that the world "has a long way to go before girls growing up see a lot of role models in the sciences." She expresses concern, too, with a current trend away from basic science. "It worries me if we start coming under the same pressures as corporations with quarterly reports," she says. "That's not how you get the scientific engine to work properly. Outreach follows strength. Industry will come to us because we do high-quality research." If science finds a cure for AIDS, observes this connoisseur of microscopic order, "it won't be
