Click here to subscribe today or Login.
WILKES-BARRE — From the start, the students had a bone to pick with Valerie Kalter — 26 bone shapes, to be exact, in various cardboard boxes tucked off to the sides of the Wilkes University Fenner quadrangle.
Kalter, associate professor of biology, ran the “Bone Hunt” lab Wednesday morning, one of numerous opportunities during the week-long “Women Empowered By Science” (WEBS) camp for some 150 seventh and eighth grade students from area schools. She began and closed her session playing “The Bone Song” by Mr. Parr on YouTube (to the tune of “Jealous” by Nick Jonas:
Upper arm-humerus bone it’s true; The forearm is separated in two; It is made radius/ulna; Carpals-wrist bones, metacarpals are fingers.
After a, um, bare-bones lesson on the topic, she sent the students in groups of two or three to find enough fake bones to assemble a representation of a human skeleton. Armed with bags and a list of quest items, they headed outdoors.
If you’re thinking all this should be above the obvious puns, consider the back of the WEBS shirts worn by both students and staff: The top line read “I may be.” The middle line had the elemental table symbols for nitrogen, erbium and dysprosium — “N-Er-Dy.” The bottom offered the punchline: “But only periodically.”
Yet no one cracked a single bone quip. When one team said they still needed to find vertebrae, no one joked about “showing some spine.” There were no “I find this humerus” comments upon discovering the box of upper arm bones, no “the game is a foot” while picking up a representation of the tarsals, and no “I need a hand” while seeking the carpals.
Adrienne Wren surely had the best opportunity back at the lab as the students assembled a simple example of a human skeleton when Kalter, discovering another team was missing a leg bone, asked if she had “an extra tibia.” The correct corny answer, of course, would have been “no, but I have a spare rib!”
Wren just answered no. Yet when the pun was suggested, she did perk up. “I would like spare ribs for lunch!”
The goal of WEBS each year is to spark interest in a possible science career for women, who for decades have been underrepresented in the field. Yet a spot check with a few of the young women at the bone hunt suggested they already had the option in their sites.
Not only did Kate Reed already have “Dr.” written on her name tag (and “future president”), asked of her favorite lab so far she cited the pharmacy one, where they made a drug of sorts.
Gina Pugliese said her favorite had been nutrition, vividly describing how she squeezed meat in a cheese cloth to extract the liquid, then conducted tests to determine the various components. She is thinking about being a doctor, though isn’t sure yet.
