Seattle Children's rolls out a mobile lab to spread word: Science is cool

The first science-lab-on-wheels on the West Coast rolled up to Seattle's Northgate Elementary Tuesday, and fourth- and fifth-graders, looking like miniature scientists in aprons, latex gloves and safety glasses, successfully isolated their DNA.

It was the first trip for the Science Adventure Lab, a project of Seattle Children's hospital, and one of 50 planned school visits from Neah Bay on the northwestern tip of the Olympic Peninsula to Onion Creek in the far northeast corner of the state.

Too few students are choosing careers in science and health, Seattle Children's scientists say, and the mobile lab is one way to try to change that.

The vehicle is hard to miss. It's a 45-foot-long rolling billboard for science, adorned with colorful illustrations of a brain cell, a virus, red blood cells. Inside, it's a small version of the labs used by researchers at Children's, with smooth, gray lab tables, and sophisticated equipment such as centrifuges and micropipettes, respirometers and heat blocks.

The lessons are designed to give students in grades four through eight a taste of what scientists do, and increase their knowledge about their health.

"This exposes kids to what a real research lab is like," said Amanda Jones, the lab's director and a microbiologist.

The DNA experiment done at Northgate Elementary, for example, was a simplified but real version of what grown-up scientists do.

"I'm pretty surprised that it was possible for us to do it," said 9-year-old Brianna Tran, holding a black card on which she'd swabbed a piece of her DNA to take home.

Her fourth-grade class — the second ever to use the bus — spent about an hour Tuesday gathering cells from inside their cheeks (by rubbing their cheeks against their teeth), spitting into a tube, then taking that spit through a series of steps using chemicals, heat and cold to break open the cheek cells, isolate, then clump the cells' DNA.

The end result was a stringy, slimy-looking substance that elicited a few "eews."

Afterward, fourth-graders Shaylon Williams and Jakob Schreiner declared the experiment "awesome" and "cool."

"I learned that DNA is bigger than I thought," Schreiner said.

The Science Adventure Lab is one of about 20 mobile science labs in the country, but Jones said it's the first sponsored by a children's hospital, and the first on the West Coast. She also said it's the first to target students as young as fourth grade.

The lab was designed to be a rolling laboratory at a cost of about $500,000, paid by Purchase a Miracle, a Washington grocery and drugstore campaign that benefits Seattle Children's hospital. Seattle Children's is covering the majority of all the other costs involved, with financial help and donations from a number of other organizations, including the U.S. Department of Education.

The visits are free to the schools, and Jones and neuroscientist Mark Ruffo will drive the bus from place to place as well as teach most of the classes. So, in the name of science, they both recently earned commercial driver's licenses.

At each school the mobile lab visits, students will have pre- and post-lessons with their classroom teachers along with the experiments in the lab.

Jones acknowledges one visit per school isn't enough to give students more than a taste of what research scientists do. But the goal for the lab's first few years is to reach as many students as possible.

As the Northgate students left the lab, teacher Zac Stowell assembled his students for a class photo to commemorate the event.

"Everybody say DNA," Jones said.

Linda Shaw: 206-464-2359 or lshaw@seattletimes.com