“The reward for us is when they start asking ‘well what did you have to study in school in order to be able to do this.’ It gives us a lot of energy and is the most fun thing that we do during the week. We want that enthusiasm to carry over to the kids and we want the kids to see that being a scientist is a viable option and that we’re not these stuffy people in white coats who don’t talk to anybody.”
Student: how long have you been a scientist
Annie: I started graduate school in 2003, but I studied biology in college. And I started college in 1999. So about 10 years...
Student: annie what is your major study?
Annie: I study chemical communication in longhorned beetles
Student: how long have you been a scientist
Annie: I started graduate school in 2003, but I majored in biology in college
Student: scot how long have you been a scientist
Scot: I have been doing this for a long time
Scot: I got hired to help set this up 10 years ago
“(ITG) wanted to do technology development but in 1998 when this was conceived and in 1999 when it started, this was something people didn’t know. There weren’t many examples of this — remote access scanning microscopy wasn’t done. In a lot of ways it’s unique and that’s what has kept it going.” — Scott Robinson
It was a little over 10 years ago that Robinson came to ITG and Beckman, and shortly thereafter that a powerful new electron microscope was added to the Microscopy Suite arsenal.
“Ten years ago today,” Robinson said on Jan. 12 while pointing at the Bugscope room north of his office in the Microscopy Suite’s Beckman basement digs), “within a few days of that, I was pulling the microscope in on a pallet into that room.
“We already decided what we were going to do with the microscope; we were going to start this thing called Bugscope. The microscope was funded by NSF specifically for Bugscope, to be able to run Bugscope. Of course we were going to use it for other things but we bought it to run Bugscope as a sustainable outreach program.”
A decade after it debuted, Bugscope is fulfilling the mission that was first envisioned for it in 1999. The idea for an online scientific educational outreach program featuring remote access microscopy was hatched in the 1990s with Chickscope, a technology development program that used magnetic resonance imaging to view samples.
Robinson said the cost to maintain Chickscope was prohibitive, so a proposal was made to the National Science Foundation for an environmental scanning electron microscope (ESEM) that would be used in an innovative new educational outreach program that would allow students remote access to an electron microscope via an Internet connection.
“(ITG) wanted to do technology development but in 1998 when this was conceived and in 1999 when it started, this was something people didn’t know,” Robinson said. “There weren’t many examples of this – remote access scanning microscopy wasn’t done. In a lot of ways it’s unique and that’s what has kept it going.”
Robinson said the grant proposal was for an environmental electron scanning microscope (ESEM) because they were promoted as not requiring specimen preparation, but he and others had to make some changes to the original concept.
“The conductive and non-conductive samples showed them that that wasn’t going to work and there was limited time to use the microscope in wet mode, so we are using an ESEM as a scanning electron microscope,” he said. “What’s really cool about this thing now is this is first class. It’s an ESEM but it is also a field emission electron microscope that has much, much better resolution than a normal electron microscope.”