Promoting coexistence of humans and elephants in Anamalai Hills (literally "The Elephant Hills"), situated in the Western Ghats of southern India, has been the key objective of M. Ananda Kumar for over a decade. A wildlife biologist with the Nature Conservation Foundation, Kumar is a staunch believer in the benefits that involving local communities in conservation work can reap. Kumar's work on human–elephant conflict resolution in the Ghats has been recognized with the Carl Zeiss Wildlife Conservation Award.

In an interview with Richa Malhotra, Kumar speaks of the change that has been brought about in the attitude of people towards elephants—from hostile to tolerant.

Excerpts from the interview:

What threatens elephant survival in India?

Activities such as setting up of micro hydel projects, dams, power lines or roads in prime elephant habitats pushes these animals out of their habitat into neighbouring towns and villages. That leads to negative interactions between people and elephants, and is detrimental to the elephant population in the country.

Can you talk about the ways to mitigate human–elephant conflicts?

Conflict mitigation has been going on for ages. But most conflict mitigation measures are planned from a human perspective. Take for example, electric fences or elephant-proof trenches. People look at whether a measure is feasible, typically either cost- or terrain-wise. They expect elephants to respond positively to the system—that the elephants should go back if they come across an electric fence!

Putting up an electric fence does not require any research as such. We need to look at how much area should be enclosed within the fence; whether it obstructs elephants' movement or divides their population into two sub-populations; and whether having electric fences is driving them towards other areas where people live.

It is not a strict idea that conflict mitigation measures mean elephant-proof trenches or fences. For mitigation, we need to understand the ground situation well with sound scientific research and share that research with the locals through appropriate participatory approaches. Only then will conflict mitigation make sense.

Speaking of scientific research, has enough gone into studying human–elephant interactions and the way elephants respond to mitigation measures? Do we need to put in more resources?

In India, the majority of research on human–elephant conflict is based on ecological studies. A huge amount of money has gone into this. But what is missing here is taking the results of those studies to the people and environment. We tend to give suggestions in scientific reports but we do not know how the suggestions work on the ground. The scientific community, conservationists and practitioners must go one step ahead.

How effective are elephant corridors in connecting fragmented habitats?

In most places they are very effective. What we need to know is how important a corridor is from the elephant's perspective. A forest or non-forest corridor may look beautiful to us, but for elephants to use it, it may not be such. Corridors are not just physical connectivities; they have to make biological sense to elephants. For the 88 elephant corridors that have been identified in the country, we need to evaluate what percentage provides benefits to elephant populations. Even though these corridors are being used by elephants, what is their percentage use? We can then talk to local people to provide more space for elephants and see if people are willing to move out of corridors.

When exactly did you start working on human–elephant conflicts in the Western Ghats and what positive changes have you observed since?

I started in 2002. In the small area that we have been working in, in the Anamalai Hills, we have seen a dramatic shift in people's perspectives; they feel safer. We have not studied it yet but according to feedback, people decided to stay because they get early intimation of the location of elephants via SMS and are prepared for a situation. Otherwise, they would have left the place long ago.

How do the elephant alerts you just mentioned work?

We have a team that tracks elephants every day and takes the GPS location of herds; we also get information from the forest department and local people. Based on the GPS locations we identify vulnerable areas lying within a 2 km radius of the elephants' location. We are sending out this information in three ways.

First, the information is scrolled on a local television channel. Second, we send out SMSes to people who are willing to receive them on their mobile. Third, we have installed early-warning indicator lights.

Apart from these, there is a rapid response team at the forest department and a helpline so that people can seek help at any point of time. The department has also tried out different measures. Collectively, these are resulting in a decline in the number of damages to property and lives lost.

Can you tell us more about the early-warning indicator lights?

Most people who lost their lives were walking alone at odd hours when there is less human activity. That is when elephants usually move from one forest patch to another.

We want people to notice if the light installed is blinking; it means elephants are somewhere close by – within a kilometre from the light – and they can call for help or to find out their exact location, and then avoid walking alone. The lights are not for illumination; they are just indicators. We want people to notice these and beware.

The lights can be operated with a mobile phone. Local people operate these rather than us because we wanted them to share responsibility and feel proud of being part of a system that is benefitting hundreds; they are also the first to see elephants in their respective localities. Three people can operate each light. Locals know who are operating and can intimate them. A missed call by the registered operators to SIM cards installed with the lights can turn them on or off.

A lot of your work is done on the ground with local communities and the government. How has their response been?

Before we started working on Asian elephants in the Hills, we had another programme on rainforest restoration. So we have been living here for the past 20 years and the locals have seen how genuinely we are concerned for them. They tell us that they know we are working towards their betterment and that of the elephants. However, the solutions are not unidirectional; they come from the people, too. For instance, the idea of using the local cable TV network for broadcasting elephant alerts was suggested by the manager of a tea estate.

In the beginning nobody believed that the systems would work, including the funding agencies. When we took the idea of using lights to the forest department – since the approach falls out of the conventional thinking on conflict mitigation – it was not accepted easily to begin with. Later, when we experimented with the lights, they joined in and were willing to cover more areas. We worked by experimenting and showing the benefits to people and the government. We needed to take them along with us in conservation.

On a different note, what are your views on the dilution of environmental laws and the focus on development at the cost of environment in our country?

In India less than 5% of the land is protected area. People live on 95% of the land and if 95% of the land cannot solve human problems, using the remaining 5% of forest area is not going to. Development need not be about expansion but increasing the efficiency of what exists. Millions of people depend on forests and we need to safeguard what remains.

What is your take on the famous Madhav Gadgil versus K. Kasturirangan committee reports on Western Ghats?

The intentions are good on both sides. They must have looked at the feasibility, logistics and wildlife interests before taking a decision. Undoubtedly, there are areas that need to be kept away from any kind of development. At the same time, we need to look at the importance of forests for people. But giving priorities to people does not mean that we eradicate wildlife.

Any message you'd like to convey to our readers...

Science is a small part of the whole conservation field. We tend to see from a scientist's perspective but we should also look at other dimensions and use a people's participatory approach in addressing critical conservation issues. We need to take science to the people and share information with them. It is not enough to do science and expect people to listen to you.

A vocal proponent of sustainable development and a seasoned crusader who has fought many environmental battles, Sunita Narain is currently the Director General of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) and the Director of the Society for Environmental Communications. She was a plenary speaker at the recently concluded Student Conference on Conservation Science – Bangalore 2014, where she took time out to answer our questions in her characteristically engaging and forthright manner.

What or who inspired your career choice?
Anil Agarwal, the person I worked with at CSE really gave me a sense of both the wonder of environment and the purpose of our work. Anil was basically a journalist, and a mechanical engineer, but then moved on to become this country's most important environmentalist and in my view, he did what none of us after him have been able to do, which is to make the very crucial connections between why a country like India needs to be so concerned about its environmental present and future. He definitely is my inspiration.

What is the most impactful issue/project you have been involved in? Is there one issue that you currently champion that is keeping you awake at night?
It is difficult to say; we're in so many different battles all the time. If I look around me and see the state of affairs, it is hard to say that any of us have made any impact at all. But on the other hand, you take some amount of courage from the little battles that you keep winning, even if you don't win the war. One such, is the field of water harvesting, where one of our successes was to draw the attention of people to the issue and help them understand why we need to care about traditional systems of knowledge. There is also the whole issue of decentralized water, which today has become a buzzword. I know how difficult it was when we raised it in the mid 90s and everybody rejected it saying it was an antiquated idea, which just won't work.
But most people in the field will agree with me when I say that our work is a continuum. You just have to keep at it and focus on all the problems that need to be worked on. People in my field abroad are able to take a "unifocus" view of the world and their work. I find in India, we can start with a focus, but as we get into any issue, it opens up and gets broader and broader.

Who are your women role models—not necessarily in science?
My mother. Most women relate to this answer, however clichéd. In my case, she was particularly important, because she single-handedly brought up four of us. I saw the adversities that she faced, but I also witnessed extraordinary courage. I always say that if I didn't do what I did, she'd just come back and kill me.

How easy/hard has it been for you to achieve a sustainable work-life balance? How can institutions help in this regard?
I don't think I have a sustainable work-life balance. I work. But I enjoy my work, so I usually find it very to answer this question.

Do you think young women need/benefit from older women mentors? Do you think women need to be mentored differently from men?
No! I don't think women need to be mentored differently. I don't think women need women mentors. I don't think it matters in my field whether you are a woman or a man. I don't think we have the excuse any more to say that we cannot do something. We are very bright—some of the brightest people I have worked with are women. We are very dedicated, very honest to our work and we have the ability to succeed. I am very clear about this. I can't be a hypocrite about this because I run an institution of 150 people, half of which are women. I make it very clear to the women who work with me that they get no privileges. They travel as rough; they do whatever it takes to get the work done. And they do it, and enjoy it. I think about myself in this context as well. I come from a background, which has four generations of literate women. Now, with that kind of privilege, how can I ask for special favours?

Does your organization have a cell or policy to address sexual harassment and related issues? Are employees aware of these policies?
Absolutely. We have a no tolerance policy. If there are any problems, we have a committee, much like the Vishaka guidelines. We do whatever it'll take, but the bottom line is "no tolerance". Young women starting out with the organization know they are safe.

What are the structural roadblocks that impede progress of women environmentalists/researchers?
I think there are some problems unique to women scientists for sure. It's a little difficult for me to say because I'm a little bit of an outsider. But if you look at it, the top in Indian science is made up of men, specifically, older men. I've often asked this question: what is the real barrier? Why are women not making it to the top when it comes to Indian science? It's not the case in medicine, law and many other professions. Indian science needs to introspect. Why is there a glass ceiling?
My own sense is, because it is very conservative, it is highly structured, and is basically very arrogant. Most people feel extremely inhibited when they talk to Indian scientists because they look down upon them. And I think as women, it is probably even tougher to deal with such an environment. It is not so much the case with conservation science, but definitely with mainstream Indian science. There is really something fundamentally wrong.

Have things become better since you first started your career? In what respects?
In my generation, we were much more, for want of a better word, genteel, about making our space, and careful and cautious and trying to make sure that we widened our space slowly. I don't think Indian women today have to do that, and I'm thrilled about it. I see that many of them today have no need for that kind of genteelness. They're there; they're there to be taken seriously; they want to be treated as an equal and are very clear that they are not going to be pushed around. I think that this is fantastic and will make huge changes in the years to come.

One change that, in your opinion, would hugely benefit women researchers?
It's always marriage, or children that people bring up in this context. I don't think that's the issue any more. I think openness within institutions would help most. I think it's the weakening of Indian Institutions, which, if at all, will lead to a lack of spaces for Indian Women. We don't have a problem where the Institutions are strong, vibrant, dynamic and open.

One piece of advice that you wish someone had given you way back when
To be politer.

A quiet Sunday afternoon sees a steady stream of visitors to the Indian Cartoon Gallery, Bangalore. Chuckling and chortling, they work their way through the 70-odd species of birds and animals caricatured with eye-catching exaggerations, frequently pausing to learn about the animals, their behavior and habitats from the informative blurbs. is artist Rohan Chakravarthy's first solo show. caught up with him at the gallery to chat about his art and his engagement with science and conservation.

While cartoons are his first love, Rohan's career is one that straddles art and science. He has done illustrations for articles and conservation campaigns. He also recently finished illustrating a field manual for WWF. In the pipeline are a line of merchandise for an ecotourism company and illustrations for a children's book. In addition. he recently launched a website called vectoridae where he provides royalty free vector illustrations on wildlife. "It is intended for science, conservation and other wildlife related media. It is one avenue through which I can collaborate with conservation campaigns," Rohan explained.

Universities in the West offer courses on scientific illustration. While this remains a very unusual career choice in India, Rohan and others like him are opening up avenues and increasing the scope of the field.

When asked what inspires his art, he said, "A bit of reading and a bit of travel. Inspiration comes from different sources. I don't travel as much as I would like to but I do hit the jungles whenever I can."

As I took a second look around the room, I was curious. Which were the animals or birds he found most challenging to capture? Does he have favourites? "The oriental dwarf kingfisher. It is only the most colourful bird in the world. It took me three attempts to get it right," he said, without missing a beat. "I really enjoyed doing the crow. And the bush frog took me a whole day to paint and turned out pretty satisfactory, so I'm quite happy with it," he added after a moment's reflection.

There is a very apparent attention to detail in his caricatures and cartoons. "I do studies of the animals before I go about drawing them. If there's an animal I haven't seen, then I watch videos, read up and only after that I draw a cartoon or caricature," he revealed.

As an outsider who interacts closely with scientists and conservationists, he observed that, "It is a very closely knit fraternity. It's quite fun interacting with wildlife scientists. They are wildly different in their interests and manner, so there is a lot of scope for generating humour within that community itself. I have a lot of cartoons on wildlife scientists. My own brother is a wildlife scientist, so he inspires a lot of cartoons."

Is he interested in teaching art, I asked. "Not in the near future. Maybe when I'm old and have nothing else to do", he quipped mischeviously.

Believing that an innovative idea has potential is a key to success. Muniasamy Neerathilingam (Munish) who is currently associated with the Protein Technology Core facility at C-CAMP had such an idea. His team recently discovered the potential application of tender coconut water (TCW) in recombinant protein production.

Munish was already familiar with using TCW for the growth of microbes and endogenous protein production. Understanding its sterile nature, he realized it could also be an ideal media for recombinant protein production. In addition, coconuts are readily available and economical, reasons that encouraged him to pursue this as a marketable product.

His innovative work gained media attention and a positive response from pharmaceutical sector. "This new medium will help develop raw materials for drugs at rates so cheap it threatens to make traditional media like animal products and chemicals go out of the market…" says Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw of Biocon. This simple but elementary idea is but a few steps away from being patented. Deepti Chandraprakash from IndiaBioScience chatted with him to learn more about his research, motivation to work on new ideas, patenting and licensing, and his scientific interests and experiences.

Your recent work on using tender coconut water as a media for expression of recombinant proteins has garnered interest. How did you stumble upon the idea?

The work on tender coconut water research happened by chance. During one busy day, I chose to have tender coconut water (TCW) instead of coffee. While cherishing the taste of this natural drink, I pondered about how nature keeps this water so sterile. That's when the idea of using it as sterile media for growth emerged. I didn't allow the idea to sit for long, but instead started working right away to prove my hypothesis.

What makes TCW a better sterile media than others?

Generally, preparing media for microbial growth requires tedious procedures like extraction of nutrients, their maintenance, sterilization and supplementation to meet the requirements for microbial growth and development. A lot of manpower and money goes into preparing media, right from getting all the required components to sterilization of the media.

While there have been studies focused on the growth of microbes and endogenous protein production in TCW, its application in recombinant protein production has not been demonstrated before. There are so many advantages--it is naturally sterile, economical and abundantly available.

Also, in the current scenario, the therapeutic application of recombinant proteins is increasing, and there is need for media free from any toxin. TCW serves as excellent source mainly for the reason that it is plant derived and deficient in endotoxins, compared to other commercially available media.

Are there any limitations to the use of TCW?

TCW collected from different geographical locations showed variation in growth rates attributed to differences in chemical composition. Subsequent studies in an attempt to normalize the inconsistency revealed that nitrogen sources were the only limiting factor.

Apart from addition of nitrogen sources, tender coconut water can be used without any major modification.

There is a constant effort by the government to facilitate Academia-Industry partnerships that can lay a strong foundation for new innovations. Nevertheless, there still exists a huge gap between invention and commercialization. To rectify this gap, there is now increased focus on patenting academic inventions and licensing. After Munish emphasized the importance of TCW as a potential source of sterile media, he discussed his stand on patenting and licensing this innovative technology.

Your innovation is now moving towards becoming a novel technology that the pharmaceutical companies are interested in. Was this an easy journey?

When I got tender coconut water to the lab as a research material, people laughed at me. But once our team started working and we got results, we were all set to publish. BMC accepted our work after about six months of constant review and completion of additional supporting experiments. I thought it was just another research paper, but with the move towards patenting and licensing, the whole scenario changed. Now people are talking about this as work that has potential applications in the pharmaceutical industry, and many firms are approaching us to use this technique commercially.

How easy is the process of patenting?

Discussions with C-CAMP's Technology Transfer Office allowed me to envision the potential in licensing this technique. The office then evaluated the application stringently, and also assisted in filing the patent.

The work had merit so it got accepted with appreciation but nothing would have happened without the immense support from C-CAMP.

As Munish reflected on the positive impact of his workplace on his research, the conversation turned to his views on the research climate in India and his experiences as a researcher and a mentor. Munish has two Masters degrees from India and had previously worked in the private sector. He moved to Oxford for his D.Phil in Biochemistry and subsequently to University of Wisconsin and University of Texas for post-doctoral studies. He recounted his experiences of the scientific culture both in India and abroad, and we furthered our discussion to understand what made him come back to India.

What brought you back to pursue your research in India?

Prof. S Ramaswamy, the co-founder and current CEO of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP), gave me an opportunity to head the Protein Core Facility in C-CAMP. I quit my job in industry and decided to come back to India since this job opened avenues to work in my area of interest: protein chemistry, NMR based research, and protein purification.

What is your experience working in India?

C-CAMP is a good place to work in, and a great model for attracting talent back to the country.The main focus of the Protein Technology Core facility is to provide services and most of our time is dedicated towards this. When I get some interesting ideas that I think are executable given the time and resources, I spend extra hours in the lab designing experiments to work on the ideas. The job gives me the flexibility to explore my research interests.

What would you like to tell Indian scientists who want to return home and start a career in India?

I feel the breathing time is limited working abroad. There, VISA issues bind us, and getting a faculty position is not all that easy. In India, opportunities and funding options are increasing, with more national institutes and research organizations providing a scientifically sound environment.

You are at C-CAMP as Director of the Protein Technology Core facility. What do think is important to keep your team and students motivated?

One should create interest and the team members will motivate themselves. When I spoke to my lab members about the tender coconut project initially and told them that the success might lead us to patent the technique, it inspired them to work really hard towards achieving the goal. When we see potential and talent in students, we should lead them in the right direction, encourage them and they will be motivated to work.

Our team, including students, spends coffee breaks discussing science and the latest developments. We do not have a traditional hierarchical model. Everyone calls each other by their first names.

I learnt from my mentor at Oxford, Prof. Iain D Campbell, who always emphasized that learning is a never-ending process, that we learn a lot from our students. All that is required is to be simple, easy to approach, and give them credit for their work.

From the entire interactive conversation, it was obvious that giving new directions to ideas is not all that simple. It requires confidence in one's ideas, determination, patience, hard work and finally knowing the market. Most inventions arise out of necessity. In this case, Munish understood the need of the pharmaceutical company and tried to address the problem. His creative idea grew, got nourished with the help of his motivated team and isnow all set to taste the fruit of success.

For further reading see: Sekar N, Veetil SK, Neerathilingam M. Tender coconut water an economical growth medium for the production of recombinant proteins in Escherichia coli. BMC Biotechnol. 2013 Sep 2;13:70. doi: 10.1186/1472-6750-13-70 PMID:24004578

Graham Hatfull talked to IndiaBioscience at length about the program, the challenges it presents and what the future holds...

What motivated you to start the PHIRE program?

I think the idea that we can prepare people for successful research careers by putting them in a classroom and teaching them how to remember stuff, is misplaced. We all know, instinctively, that people think in different ways. They think about problems in different ways. And I believe that science progresses best, and fastest, and most productively when you have communities of people that think differently. We hear about thinking outside the box. Well, doing well in the formal academic setting, the classroom, as a qualification to doing well in research is the epitome of constrained thinking inside the box. The question is, how do you break that? You have to find other ways in which students can find out for themselves whether research is an area that they can contribute to and have an opportunity for people to explore. To find those who will mentor and support future researchers, who has good strong capabilities and intuition for doing research, you can only do that by having people do research and see whether they have the aptitude for it or not. To me it makes perfect sense, but I think often it is a poorly utilized priority.

How does PHIRE address this problem?

I think it's relatively common in the States to have undergrads doing research in labs. Only usually, it happens in a non-programmatic kind of way. So it's not uncommon for an undergraduate student to end up in a lab, perhaps working under the supervision of a graduate student. But it's not that it happens with every lab or with every student. So one of the things that we did that was different was to explore whether we could find ways, to engage not just one or two undergraduates in a lab but to do it in a more programmatic way. So it was really that, coupled with the recognition that today's students are going to be tomorrow's professors. And doing research requires skills that people can develop, which is very different from doing well in the classroom in an academic setting. Whether it is undergraduate students or high school students, I would put them in the same cadre as novice scientists – people who may be curious or interested, but who are doing science or doing research for the first time. There are obvious challenges to being able to do that: thinking about the numbers that one might like to engage, thinking about the kinds of projects that would be suitable and dealing with a group of people who have no prior experience in the lab.

Did your research interest lend itself easily to this kind of an approach or did you have to change your research a little bit so that students could get involved in the program?

I would argue that the directions that we have gone in were motivated strongly by the research questions that we already were broadly interested in addressing. It is not being molded just so it works for education. In fact, I'd go beyond that and say that if anybody is thinking on how to use their research lab to advance the education mission, to engage novice students in science research, then it is critical that it addresses an important research priority. Otherwise it becomes something less than doing science. In my experience, students have a keen nose for figuring out whether what they're doing is some kind of an exercise or whether it is genuine discovery. And the consequences of that are really, really big. When students know that they're engaged in doing important research, they get fired up and put in lots of hours in the lab. They motivate themselves. In our experience, we really were motivated by addressing important scientific questions and really getting lucky in finding out that some of these questions were a particularly good fit to advancing this broader education mission as well. So the whole program is not by well-thought out design, but by serendipity and getting lucky, really, with the fact that the research interest that we had was just tailor-made for undergraduate research initiatives.

So high school and undergraduate students search for an answer to a research question. That can be quite overwhelming for a beginner, right?

The question that we always start with and introduce students to, is the research question of trying to understand the genetic diversity of the bacteriophage population and to gain insights and to learn about the evolution mechanisms that give rise to this phage population. So that's really the starting point. Students I think can recognize relatively early on that that is something which is a broad question for which there is not clear and complete answers but that it's something that they can contribute to. The next part of the articulation is the approach by which they can address the question. And that is what excites and motivates them. That if they go and take a sample for anywhere they choose, they can isolate a bacteriophage that's new, that they will discover. Then they go on to name and characterize and then sequence its genome and understand how the phage that they have isolated and named relates to all of the other phages that have been characterized. The opportunity to do that, I think, is often received as being interesting and stimulating and the idea of being able to isolate one's "own" virus de novo from the environment is kinda cool! It is sort of the equivalent of naming your own star, except, you actually get to go isolate the phage and work on it. That sense of project ownership is clearly very important. It doesn't mean that all students will get fired up by this phage discovery project, but clearly, many do. And they get a relatively quick and easy chance to discover whether this type of research is something they want to do or not. Whereas, many of us who have taught students in lab classes know that if we just tell them to mix things together and see if they get the "right answer", it's no more exciting to them than taking a math test.

What percentage of students go on to the more advanced levels of sequencing and beyond?

We have implemented this general platform in a number of different subcontexts. The answer to your question depends on the particular context of the program and it changes as a matter of time as well. In Pittsburgh, we just have high school and undergraduate students enter the lab and join the research. In the second configuration, the same idea is formulated as a two-term course for first year undergraduate students across the US. For the last five years, we've had a third configuration of the program – an intense two-week workshop in Durban, South Africa. The specifics across these platforms are different.

When we first started the programs in 2002, it was genome sequencing was relatively expensive. Additionally, the students had to do all of the sequencing by themselves and it was a significant investment of time and effort. So the proportion of students that would do that efficiently and successfully was small. Now, sequencing technologies have advanced, so it's cheaper and quicker and easier to sequence genomes. On the plus side, a very high proportion of students can have their genome sequenced and they can move quickly on to the annotation and comparative analysis, and actually progress beyond that to addressing particular questions of interest. The downside is that sequencing has really come down to the preparation of DNA and handing it to somebody else and getting the sequence back, so there's more of a divorcement from the actual process. I think it is educationally rich to learn what is actually going on and they miss out on it.

In the configuration where the general platform is being offered as a course for first year undergraduate students, in about 70 schools and colleges across the US, in their first term, the students will go and isolate the phages and almost everybody in the class will succeed in isolating a phage sample from the environment. However, typically only one or two of those genomes will get sequenced and then annotated during the next term. The issue there is mostly overall cost. I suspect that just as we had changed and developed the configurations as the technologies advanced, in a few years' time, the technology will advance yet again, and the numbers of genomes that can be sequenced and annotated will be reconfigured once again. So I don't see these as fixed end points. We're on a process that is parallel to a lot of other technological advancements and we just need to keep in step with them and utilize them in the most effective way possible.

What about experiment design? In the more advance stages, do the students get to design their own simple experiments or do they merely follow a prescribed protocol?

A lot again depends on the specifics of the context. In the broader program at other schools and universities, the principal opportunity is to have students do the phage discovery course in the first year, but in their subsequent years, they could conceivably take a more advanced course that could involve part of the bacteriophage research or alternatively they could do the equivalent of an independent project and pursue their goal. In Pittsburgh, definitely, one of the goals that we've worked on in the past couple of years is trying to figure out how best to train and position students to think about how they can come up with their own ideas to address a specific question, which can then be tested experimentally. That's still a very, very challenging process for students, but a critical and an important one. I'm not sure that we've figured it out yet. But I think that providing some structure, encouraging and showing students how to read and understand the literature and to try to help them figure out how scientists come up with ideas, is really part of the goal.

What are some of the key scientific results that have emerged from the program?

We've been able to define the genetic complexity of a group of bacteriophages that share a common host. Some of that could be seen superficially as stamp collecting. We don't know what they are, and we're trying to find out. I think that the strategy of isolating and characterizing phages of one particular host gives us a unique insight into what the population looks like. And it wouldn't have happened without having this disseminative, joint research and education initiative. That has provided us a way of thinking about broader aspects of the phage population. How do the phages switch from one bacterial host to another? What are the forces that drive that? How does what we learn from the genomes reflect on the dynamics of the broader population?

We have focussed on the mycobacterial phages in particular because they can provide insights into understanding the hosts, mycobacterium tuberculosis, perhaps, being the most prominent and important species among the hosts. I think that it's clear that the phages are telling us a lot about the host and they're also contributing tools that can be used to manipulate the host. And so, from a very practical point of view, development of tools for mycobacterial genetics and using phages to gain an insight into the physiology and the genetics of tuberculosis is clearly an important area.

Additionally, because of the diversity of the phage population, – meaning just lots of different types, with genes that we don't know what they do, and probably 4 billion years of evolution and a large and dynamic population – they're full of biological novelty. It's a very rich system for anybody to study and we have barely scratched the surface. One of our more recent papers, for example, describes how, in one of these, the bacteriophage immunity systems work, in terms of genetic regulation.

Are there other research problems that lend themselves as easily to similar student initiatives? Has this program inspired others that you know of?

Absolutely! We got kind of lucky in that the phage discovery genomics project really does have some attributes that make it well-suited to our program. It would be arrogant for me to suggest that that's the only project of that kind. I'm sure that's not true. In fact, much of what we've thought about and analyzed is whether one can dissect and tease out the attributes that are most useful. That should be helpful for others to think about how their research might be able to tap into some of those attributes and therefore make it as effective as possible for such an effort. There are several good candidates for thinking in that context. But I'd also say that finding other projects that satisfy all the attributes that make this program work has turned out to be a little bit more difficult than one might think.

There are some similar projects that I'm aware of. There's a colleague at Yale, Scott Strobel, another HHMI professor. He has been running a project that involves going with students to tropical rainforests in South America where students isolate endophytes, which are bacterium of fungi that live under the bark of plants and trees. They do this in the context of having a guide that's knowledgeable about the local biology as well as knowledgeable in the traditional uses of medicines. The students isolate these endophytes and then they take them back to Yale where they then work on isolating, characterizing and studying them. Many of them are strains of unknown species and they make lots of interesting things like anti-microbials, antibiotics, anti-fungals and so on. The link to what we've been doing is that Scott has very much taken advantage of this concept of project ownership, which is important in motivating students. Another project involves students in characterizing worm genomes.