The burgeoning interest of students in majors offered by the Department of Biological Sciences is spurring the growth of new courses and laboratories. A new lecture sequence, Biology 342, "'Principles of Physiology One," and Biology 343, "Principles of Physiology Two," and its component laboratory courses is now required for a majority of students who began their first year in the 1995-96 school year. A substantial investment of approximately $575,000 in laboratory equipment was made by the Provost's Office and the College of Arts and Sciences for two new laboratory courses, which are held in a remodeled classroom in Irvine Hall.
Mary Chamberlin, associate professor of biological sciences specializing in animal physiology, said creation of the new laboratories was prompted by a realization that students needed a hands-on laboratory course in order to properly understand physiology. "Several of us who teach biological sciences courses agreed that it is hard to teach animal physiology if students don't have some understanding of the cellular level, and it's less than satisfactory to teach cellular-level physiology without some understanding of whole animal physiology," Dr. Chamberlin explained. She said she originally designed the lecture courses that are now requirements for the laboratory courses. "After team-teaching the lecture sequence with Ralph DiCaprio, associate professor of neurophysiology, we determined that a laboratory component was needed." The two laboratory courses-Biology 354. "Principles of Physiology Laboratory One," and Biology 355, "Principles of Physiology Laboratory Two"-were initiated during winter and spring quarter of the 1995-96 school year and will be offered during fall and winter and, tentatively, spring quarters this year. Dr. Chamberlin explained:
This is a course that integrates chemistry and physics with biology. A problem for many students is that they don't get much laboratory experience. That's especially true in biological sciences, where there often isn't an experimental lab. This will help reinforce concepts of the lectures, which students can schedule during the same quarter. It gives them practical experience with how equipment is used-how computers are used for data acquisition or to generate graphs, for example. In this physiology lab we actually do experimental maneuvers that are not unlike what you would see in a research lab. Our students are expected to analyze data and think about it. That is new, and hard for some of them, but it gets them to think about what experiments can and cannot tell you and about how experiments are designed.
New equipment for the laboratories includes state-of-the-art computers which are used to acquire and store data as well as create charts and graphs. With the wide variety of physiological equipment that has been purchased students can perform measurements such as oxygen consumption of both air-breathing and water-breathing animals, intracellular membrane potentials, muscle contractions, ion transport across epithelial cell layers, blood pressure, enzyme kinetics, intracellular calcium concentrations, and the organic and inorganic composition of biological fluids.
Dr. Chamberlin said it has been a challenge to plan and implement the lab courses but one she has enjoyed. "I've been responsible for ordering the new equipment, setting everything up, planning the experiments, and overseeing the first labs we taught in the winter and spring quarters," she said. "We've also brought in some new faculty to help with teaching, as well as utilizing existing faculty members. By the time last year's first-year students are juniors and have to take these courses we'll have at least 200 students a year in both the lectures and labs. Because the labs are experiment-intensive we need to have no more than eighteen students in each section, and each section will have two instructors and one assistant."
"There aren't many universities that offer an undergraduate physiology lab like this, and I hope the students realize how lucky they are. They might complain that it's a lot of work-it is-but they have the opportunity here for a very rewarding experience," she added.
James Sancrant, a senior majoring in biology and biochemistry, took the laboratory course during spring quarter. "I haven't seen anything like this in other laboratories." he commented. "There is an amazing amount of equipment and technology here. The experiments seem to drive home the principles we learned in lecture. Seeing them instead of just reading about them is very helpful."