Class Spurs Interest In Research

Ally M. Freedy ’14 came to Harvard leaning heavily towards becoming a Neurobiology concentrator. At the beginning of freshman spring, she sought out research opportunities and secured a position in the lab of molecular and cellular biology professor Takaoa K. Hensch ’88, studying brain development.

However, within the first 12 months of college, Freedy determined that her true passion lay not in the science of the brain, but in chemistry.

By sophomore spring, Freedy had already accumulated a year’s worth of lab experience and all the associated acumen. But to broaden her research horizons, she enrolled in the class “Chemistry 100: Experimental Chemistry and Chemical Biology.”

The course is “designed to have students in lab as much as possible,” wrote chemistry and chemical biology lecturer and director of undergraduate laboratories Ryan M. Spoering in an email to The Crimson. Enrolled students work in pairs on a project, and their research is supervised by two teaching fellows. The course requires students to attend two five-hour lab sessions each week as well as a 90 minute session in which pairs present their progress the rest of the group.

According to Spoering, the distinguishing feature of this class is the autonomy it gives to students. Freedy describes Chemistry 100 as a class where you are doing “real research” because you are looking for answers that no one has ever found, rather than “doing something which has been done a million times before,” as in more basic courses that feature weekly lab components.

Freedy’s project involves synthesizing an improved version of existing PNA molecules. PNA, which stands for Peptide Nucleic Acid, is very similar in its structure to DNA, but instead of having an overall negative charge, it has a neutral charge. As a result, PNA is able to bind to other DNA molecules more efficiently. This property is powerful because it allows biologists and chemists to actively modify a strand of DNA. She said the molecule could be useful in fighting cancer, since PNA can target and bind to specific DNA strands, whereas traditional chemotherapy treatments cause additional damage to any rapidly dividing cells.

“It would only wipe out the cells in which that gene is overly expressive,” she said.

Freedy remarked that her background in neurobiology made working on this type of research particularly gratifying. She said she appreciates the balance of structure and freedom in her research class, especially because doing research in a young field like neurobiology was a little like “fumbling in the dark.”

Spoering also emphasized this notion of structured freedom within the class.

“Students can get a good sense of the challenge of research, of the effectiveness of applying their own ideas [..] ultimately this knowledge only comes through failing and figuring it out,” he wrote. “So Chem 100 is very flexible, the projects are designed to be starting points with many possibilities, and the course has minimal structure to get in the way of bench work.”