SOLS Podcasts

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Peggy Coulombe: Hi, this is Peggy Coulombe with the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, and welcome to Science Studio. Today we're doing something a bit different and off-the-cuff. I'm sitting with my guests, Charles Kazilek and his alter ego, Dr. Biology, in the middle of a micro-computers in education conference on campus. Why are we here? Charles Kazilek is a researcher, artist, and fellow podcaster who uses technology in innovative ways in science, art and the classroom. And Dr. Biology is his web persona, the host of a podcast associated with the School of Life Sciences' award-winning web site, Ask-a-Biologist, that Charles created.

Welcome, Charles, or should I call you Dr. Biology?

Charles Kazilek: Well you could use either name, but for today we'll use Charles.

Peggy: You received your Bachelor's in Arts from ASU. What kind of medium were you interested in then and wanted to pursue?

Charles: I was definitely a devout artist. I was going to be a painter and a sculptor. I was going to be that classic bohemian artist, and it all changed.

Peggy: So what changed it? What drew you back to ASU?

Charles: Interestingly enough, I didn't really leave before I made the change. It was in my senior year that I started producing medical films, of all things, for the Plastic Surgeons' Association, and that led me back into the world of science and microscopy, working with microscopes. It really wasn't quite such a break. It's like history--there's this gray area, and that was the gray area, the transition.

Peggy: So from clay to... podcasting.

Charles: Yeah, well...

Peggy: Most people would consider that a big leap.

Charles: It's definitely a big leap. We've, you and I, as we've been talking about, have been doing podcasting since November, which, since they don't know what time of year it is here, that's about three or four months. It has been really quite fun.

Peggy: People usually thing of science and art as conflicting fields, and clearly you don't think that they're incompatible; but how does this duality in interests influence your creative work?

Charles: Actually, that's a really good point. We have a tendency to say, science, on one hand, way away from art on the other hand. In reality I don't think they're separated at all. We kind of make it, we have to work to separate them. And we've only done that in recent times. If you go back to, say, Michelangelo or Leonardo, any of those people back in that period, they were architects, they were painters, they were sculptors, they were engineers, they were the people that studied anatomy. It went on and on and on. It wasn't until recently we started to specialize, and I suppose that means I'm not a specialist of any one thing, I am someone that looks across many disciplines and tries to pull them together, the different tools.

Peggy: Two products of Charles' creative mix of art, science and technology are the interactive web site, Ask-a-Biologist, designed for kids, and the visually-based paper project. We're going to talk first about Ask-a-Biologist. What made you decide to create this resource for kids and teachers?

Charles: Ask A Biologist started simply with that pretext: how could you ask a biologist a question, and how could we protect the biologists in the School of Life Sciences? That's what they are now. When I started this, ten years ago, it was actually the Department of Zoology and Microbiology, and we also had Plant Biology. What happened is, we had this brand new world, the Internet, and HTML. We started building a web site and it literally had just one page, that was how to send a question to us, and it allowed us to go ahead and have the questions come in, and in an asynchronous manner--it was easy for us to return the questions at the comfort of the researcher, they didn't have to jump on the phone, so to speak--still get it back to the public. So it was a really nice vehicle to make that connection between the two of them.

Peggy: But the other aspect has to do with providing tools for teachers.

Charles: Well, that was what started it, and when you start something, the next thing you know is, you think, well, maybe you're beginning to get people thinking about biology. So we started writing articles, we started doing profiles about researchers. We have everything from comic books or coloring pages to rather elaborate online experiments now. They all grew over time. The other part of it is the teachers. The actual demographics of Ask-a-Biologist are interesting. We have 60 percent students, we have 20 percent that are teachers, and we have 20 percent that are parents. So we reach quite a diverse audience.

The teacher side, we needed to make sure that we had content that not only would be exciting, but that they could put into the classroom and make use of it, and that usually means you're going to have to start addressing standards as well as the exciting.

Peggy: Now, how did Dr. Biology come about as a persona?

Charles: Yeah, I didn't come up with that. I did come up with it as the email address, so all the questions that come in and go out of Ask-a-Biologist are through Dr. Biology. But for the first six years of Ask-a-Biologist, I was the main conduit for those questions that came in, so every question that came in to Ask-a-Biologist went through me, to a researcher, from the researcher back through me as kind of an editorial board, and then back to the student or teacher or parent. So what happened was, everybody started getting these emails, of course, from Dr. Biology; and I would see colleagues in the hallway and they started calling me, "Well, Dr. Biology, how are you today?" I fought it for a long time, but then I succumbed to the fact that, yes, I will be that conduit, I'll be that figurehead for Dr. Biology.

Which, by the way, Dr. Biology is extremely brilliant. He's a brilliant biologist. That sounds really arrogant, but what it is, is about 100 to 120 volunteers participate in this, and as a collective it is really a wonderful resource for people to come to. In ten years, I think we have only had six questions that we could not answer.

Peggy: Wow! And about how many questions have you answered?

Charles: Now there are some that are obviously repeat questions, or they are similar to others, but in totality we are well over 20,000 questions.

Peggy: Oh my God. How do you get the answers from these professors to address children's levels? Because I mean, you have, it's K through 12--you have a high school student and you have a kindergartner. Do you do that filter or do you work with them to rewrite?

Charles: It's a combination. Actually, some of the researchers are extremely good, and when we send them the question there's a little bit of a profile. We never put ages, we never put full names, they just know whether, basically, it's a boy or a girl, what grade level they are supposed to be addressing. Some of the researchers are absolutely perfect, right on, when they write back. They use the right kind of words, and they make it easy for them to understand.

And there are others that are very good at answering, but not necessarily at the third grade level. And yes, that's where we end up being the filters, and we'll do the adjustments so that things will work a little bit better. Those are the kinds of things that we do to help facilitate it.

It's also a reason why we don't have a database that, people can come and search our past questions. I have actually fought that because of the fact, if someone comes in--first of all, students, parents, people in general are not really good at searching for content. The other thing is, when they get there, do you get the same answer for a third grader as you do for a tenth grader, that sort of thing. We can customize that.

There is a database. One of the nice things is, it's not online so it is much safer, you don't have to worry about any information ever getting out. The second thing is, it allows us to speed up some of our answers and make sure that we answer in a very personal way. So a student can be really confident that they are getting an answer from a real person, and I think that is much more important than from a computer.

Peggy: Now do you think that aspect of Ask-a-Biologist is what has really been one of the biggest benefits of Ask-a-Biologist?

Charles: It's certainly one of the more rewarding. It's rewarding because those are the ones where you typically get the thank yous. You don't get a lot of them, curiously enough, and I think it's just a fast-paced world. I think the thing that really, literally blows away the students or the parents or the teachers, we'll get these thank yous and they say, "I can't believe a real person answered. I can't believe that you took the time out of your busy schedule to help a...me"--and they might be a fifth grader. We've had students from all around the world come to us, not only in Arizona but certainly Japan, Australia, you name it. Just about every country has come to us. We've had kids that have won science fair awards that have come to us, not for us to do their project, but for some advice. So we have some mentorships that actually cross all divides.

Peggy: What aspect of Ask-a-Biologist do you enjoy the most?

Charles: That's kind of like picking your favorite child.

Peggy: Uh-huh?

Charles: All of them. I think what I enjoy the most is that we are reaching people through the questions and answers. What happens, though, is because we have this nice dialogue, I think the content we produce is better serving not only the teachers but also the students and the parents. It's curious, because we'll get, if there is a hot topic in the world we usually know it at Ask A Biologist, if it's a biological-based type of question, because the questions will come in.

I can tell you what are problematic areas for kids to learn, they have a tough time. One of the common things, for example, "What's living and not living?" That's a really good question, and that is actually a question that we have varied the answer over time, because we have learned a lot more through a lot of the research as well. In general, the idea is that we want people to enjoy all of the site and be able to use it at all different age groups, so if you talk to me about the young ones, I really love the coloring pages. If you talk about in the middle school or high school, I love what I call "fun, flexible data sets." They can come in there and they can choose how they want to use it, especially the teachers. We don't give them an experiment and say, "You have to start here, go through these steps, and then finish here." They get to choose how best it would fit in their classroom, and they can go through the scientific method and a full-time experiment in one class period if they want.

Peggy: So what's proved to be most challenging about this website?

Charles: Wow. Most challenging. I think sustainability is one of them, but we have a good group of volunteers, which is great. I think I have become the limiting factor, because I do all the early illustration, I do all the web development, and it has grown to such a size now that I have to allow other people to do some work, and we do now have a couple of young artists from the Herberger College of Art, and they are very helpful. They are actually working on a couple of projects, exciting projects that we might talk about later today, that really are helping.

So I think that it's rewarding in the sense that there is a new group of people getting excited about the site and wanting to participate.

Peggy: Why do you think that technology is important in a classroom or, for that matter, for home-schoolers.

Charles: Technology, now that's a curious thing. When I first started, I would say I was the biggest technology fan out there; but as time has gone on I have modified my view. I am a big advocate of the Web, and I am a big advocate of technology when it makes sense, in the sense of using a computer to go through some kind of an exercise. But the nice thing about the Web is you can also distribute content through it. So on Ask-a-Biologist, for example, we have PDF content that can go down, and other than the fact that you have to download it from our site, it is completely used without a computer. So again, it is very flexible. Technology, it depends on how you want to define it. If you want to say it's computers, then I think it keeps kids excited about information. But I think, more importantly, I think it is using the right technology at the right time with the right student. Not all hammers are the same, and not everything is a nail.

Peggy: That's kind of esoteric there, Chuck. So let's talk about podcasting, since we're talking about the right kind of technology, the right time, and this is a technology that is certainly taking off. What led you to start to pursue podcasts.

Charles: Actually, I would have to say Jim Elser, in the School of Life Sciences, was the trigger. He wanted to do Science Studio, which was going to be live recordings of some of the seminar speakers we have. Due to technical issues of getting good-quality recordings, that hasn't panned out yet. We haven't given it up, but we'll keep working on it. But it got me to think about the fact that we really needed to get that voice out there, to get the persona of someone, especially our researchers, out into the public; especially for kids. It's a lot more exciting listening to someone that is doing research or, for example, traveling to the Tibetan Plateau in China, and listening to Andrew Smith doing his research, because we have recordings of him doing that. So we can basically travel to other countries. We can do this "theater of the mind," and with the kids, they have better imaginations than we do, probably, so we have a really powerful tool for getting them excited. I say that if you capture their imagination, their minds will follow, and that's one of the things I think is key about Ask-a-Biologist, is we want to capture their imagination.

Peggy: What do you think the difference is between reading an article about Andrew Smith and listening to him talk about his work?

Charles: Reading the article, you get lots of illustrations. You get to see where the Tibetan Plateau is. You get to see a keystone that's in a Roman arch, and if you pull it out what happens. You get to see what a pica looks like, which is the little animal that he actually does research on. But you are reading text, and you don't really get the feeling of what that person is like. You don't get to hear the enthusiasm in his voice. These guys love what they do, and I think that is paramount when you are trying to decide if you are going to be a scientist or if you are going to get a perception of what science is like. Scientists are people. They are not all, as I say now, they are not a bunch of old white guys in white lab coats, talking to other white guys in white lab coats about a white rat. It's really a very, very diverse--both in gender and color--it is a wonderful world to be in.

Peggy: Are there many other types of children's podcasts out there that you know of?

Charles: There are, but not in this kind of vein. There are a lot of them out there for stories--a lot of podcasts out there to deal with stories. There aren't a lot of podcast sites out there that are dealing with scientists, and I haven't found any that are doing interviews with researchers that are targeting, basically, a middle-school level.

Peggy: So this is the aspect you think that makes your podcast most unique.

Charles: Without a doubt.

Peggy: What are you hoping to achieve through this medium?

Charles: Excitement. Well, think about it. If you go look at the site right now, you can blast off on a space shuttle with microbiologist Cheryl Nickerson; you can travel to the Tibetan plateau with Andrew Smith; you can listen to a solo piece from Ron Rutowski, who does work with insect vision and butterfly coloration, but he is also this wonderful musician who plays the fiddle--it's a fabulous piece. You can listen to recordings from Pierre Deviche. There is just so much richness in it, and you can take it with you. If you have an MP3 device, you don't even have to have an iPod, you can download these from our web site and listen to them.

Peggy: I understand you are about to launch a podcasting contest locally in Phoenix. So tell me something about it.

Charles: Since it's Ask-a-Biologist, and the goal has always been for students to ask questions, we needed to add that flavor, and it just made perfect sense to have students be a part of the podcast. So we have launched a contest today--it went live on the site--and what will happen is, students, through schools, or home-schoolers, can submit auditions--we have all the information on how you need to do this--to Ask-a-Biologist, and 12 times a year, since we do 24 podcasts, 12 times a year students will be able to become a co-host for Ask A Biologist, meet with Dr. Biology, interview the scientists. We will actually tour ASU, have some lunch. It will be an all-day experience. But importantly, we will have a kid's perspective in a kid's voice.

Peggy: That's fantastic. You heard it here, folks. By the way, we can also blame Charles for getting me into podcasting. It's easy to get drawn in by his mix of enthusiasm and his desire to pursue new things. What's really impressed me, besides the inherent beauty of his creations, is how he has stretched the bounds of the word "interdisciplinary." Besides creating Dr. Biology and the Ask A Biologist web site for kids and teachers, he has another endeavor called "The Paper Project," which melds not only art, science, and technology, but has a bit of choreography thrown in, too.

So tell me, Charles, I believe that even 3-D glasses are incorporated into this project. What isn't involved in The Paper Project?! No seriously, what was the creative spark that launched this idea with paper?

Charles: The spark of The Paper Project? Very simple. I have a colleague, Gene Valentine came to me--he's an emeritus English professor now, but at the time he was on the faculty here--and he was making paper. And he was making paper out of silk, which is protein-based. Most paper is made out of plant material, which is cellulose. I didn't know there was a controversy to that in the paper-making world, that that could not be paper, or may not be paper. So he asked me if I would take a look at it. I am also the technical director of W.M. Keck Bioimaging Laboratory in the School of Life Sciences. So I have all these really cool microscopes, including one called a "scanning laser confocal microscope"--now that's a mouthful.

When I put this under the microscope, this silk paper, I really, again, wasn't really expecting much, and it was just fabulous. It had so many colors--reds, greens, blues. The fibers were entwined. It was just literally eye-popping. I was so excited, I made some prints, ran across campus, and said, "Gene, we need to do something with this." That was in 1998, and that started the odyssey.

Peggy: So describe your favorite piece to me.

Charles: Well, you have to imagine, this is what you're doing. You have this paper. People pretty much yawn when you talk about the concept of paper.

Peggy: That's because they think of something white and flat, but yeah.

Charles: Yeah, that it has no character to it, it's ubiquitous. It has almost become transparent in our society, but it is so important we can't imagine living without it. Well, if you could shrink down to the size of a period at the end of a typical sentence, and you could explore this paper, not only looking at it with typical light, which we would say "reflective light," but if we used fluorescent light, which is what we do with the confocal microscope, using the lasers, you have this absolute wonderful array of color.

One of my favorites is made out of a particular kind of Australian fiber called an Australian Fan Palm. Its rich blues and greens--if anybody knows what a Monet painting looks like, The Waterlilies, it has that kind of feeling, it evokes that kind of feeling. That has got to be one of my favorite pieces purely for art.

I have another one that I really like, because we also do 3-D, the site allows us to image these paper fibers, and wearing these funky red-and-blue glasses that people have seen, we are able to go ahead and look at the structure in 3-D; and I have one that you can literally see the edge of the paper and walk out, virtually, onto the surface of the paper. It is very much like if you could go out on the surface of Mars, only from my perspective much cooler.

Peggy: So how did this work on the confocal microscope, with making prints, and morphing into a stage production?

Charles: Earlier today we got to talk about Robert Frost and the road less taken or less traveled. That is kind of what happens, is you put something out there as an artist, people come to see it, and we had some costume designers from the dance department see the show, and they were very excited, and they wanted to see if we could actually print on fabric, which we could do. But what they hadn't known, or hadn't seen, was the actual lectures that we do, where we could do these very large projections of the 3-D images. And where something might be several inches in the really small form, when you enlarge it onto a huge screen, what you end up with could be up to ten feet in these images.

So we got to meet them. We met Jennifer Tsukayama at the same time, and she is a choreographer at the School of Dance, and it was interesting because that started the collaborative for a dance production. It was actually a year too early. We didn't have the technology we needed, and we didn't have the funds to make it happen. So one year later we had the opportunity to write a grant for the Institute for Studies in the Arts, which used to be at Arizona State University. It was funded, and we developed what was called "Paper Interiors." This was a dance production that debuted at the American Dance Festival. It included five projectors; we created a virtual stage of fibers; the audience wore 3-D glasses; and the dancers actually danced in and around these fibers. It was quite exquisite.

Peggy: And I understand you have an exhibit that travels, presently.

Charles: Yeah. We started, not long after we produced the first images, we started on exhibiting what we were finding. It's grown, and it has continued to grow. We have an exhibit that has crates--"have crates, will travel" type of thing. Included, now, we have this immersive room, instead of the dance--it came from the dance. You can actually walk into a room that has a floor and three walls that are all 3-D. You can walk into these fibers and you can actually interact in this space. We actually have what are called "shadow dancers" that are part of the production, that are now in this installation.

We have people that go into the room, we have been told from the venues they've gone to, people go in and spend several hours. They are just mesmerized, which is great. It is also interesting because the immersive room, because you start, you use two projectors in this one and they are asynchronous with each other, once the room is started it can never be the same. You have the same elements, but it will never be the same. So you could come over and over and over to see that show, and it will always be different. From an artist's perspective I think that is really exciting. You never are going to get the same thing.

Peggy: So it's a dynamic type of art.

Charles: Very dynamic. Even the pieces that we print on, a lot of them that travel are on canvas, which is kind of fun--images of paper on canvas. Those, a lot of those are 3-D, and you'll actually see people that are looking at it with the 3-D glasses, they're reaching out and trying to touch the fibers. They are shifting their heads from left to right because they want to see what happens, because the fibers change their positions based on where their head is. It is very exciting, because you literally get people engaged in the art.

Peggy: So where is this exhibit now?

Charles: Well right now at the Paper Discovery Center, which is in Appleton, Wisconsin. For those that don't know about it, it is the heart of paper-making--the more commercial side; Kimberly-Clark is there amongst other paper makers. We went ahead and started the show up there in September, and it was supposed to come down in December. They called us because it was such a success and they have extended it through the end of May.

Peggy: I understand that the Paper Project has also made it to Africa.

Charles: Oh, yeah, Kenya. That was, again, curious. A colleague called. He was traveling to Kenya, he was going to be visiting the Maasai--well, several Maasai schools. He had been there before, and he knew that the schools have literally nothing. If you can imagine a room, concrete room, that basically has no lighting, they have open windows for the lighting; there is no chalkboard--they actually use a chalkboard painted on the wall to make sure that they have something to actually write on. So the technology is primitive at the very least, to say. He asked if there was anything we could do, and I thought about it for a little bit--we only had a few days. So we produced a poster that, again on paper, low-tech but real powerful technology.

Part of it has 3-D images, part of it has the beautiful color images. And we sent sets of the posters and glasses to all the classes. So now the students, they could go and explore paper in these schools that have absolutely no technology. It was great because they came back, I asked them to take a few pictures. They not only brought pictures back, but little QuickTime movies that you can see on the Paper Project web site. And it's exciting, because you can see the kids, again, interacting, trying to pull the fibers off, which is exciting. It really, again, captures their imagination.

What was interesting is, most of the students don't want to speak English, but what my colleague, Barry Wilkins said, after he visited the schools, anytime he saw a student from one of the classrooms they would say, "3-D, 3-D."

Peggy: So what is the basic thing that you are trying to communicate, as an artist, through this work.

Charles: I think what it is, is... there are several things. One is, what tools, or what is really art? Because most people don't think about using a scanning laser confocal microscope in the realm of art.

Peggy: No, I usually think of a paintbrush.

Charles: Right, exactly. And in reality, that's what we're doing. I'm painting with light--very special light, I'm using laser light, and I can decide which lasers I want to use, and I can decide what light I want to see coming back. So I have a lot of control from an artistic standpoint, on the images and what they look like. So it's a really, really expensive paintbrush. And it is also a really very detailed one, if you can imagine we're working at the size of a period.

The other thing I love doing as an artist, especially with the 3-D part, is engaging the audience. I have always been very jealous, I would say, of musicians, because if you ever go to a concert, especially one that is really an exciting concert, whether it is rock 'n roll or classical music, you will see the audience moving to the rhythm and the beat of the music. They will be engaged. But it's really exciting they are dancing.

With the 2-D art, you could engage an audience--don't mistake what I'm saying, you certainly can engage them--but it is usually in the mind and you don't see them physically engaged. With a 3-D element, I can see the audience, I can see the people that are looking at the pieces, engaged. They are thinking, they're wondering. They are just exploring something that they have taken for granted. That's just a wonderful place to play.

Peggy: Well Charles, I want to thank you for sitting out here in public with me today at the Microcomputers in Education Conference. I hope you, as listeners, have enjoyed the background ambience that you don't typically find in the studio. And for those of you who'd like to see some of the colorful work and read about Charles' newest creative ventures, just Google "Ask-a-Biologist" or "The Paper Project." He will also be featured in the Fall 2007 School of Life Sciences Newsletter, which you can get at the School of Life Sciences web site. That's sols.asu.edu.

And this is Peggy Coulombe, and you've been listening to School of Life Sciences podcast, Science Studio. The School of Life Sciences is in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences on the Tempe campus of Arizona State University.

Charles: Thank you for having me.

Peggy: Oh yeah, thanks Chuck.

[laughter]

Creating and Casting, Asking and Podcasting

Transcript - [Printable PDF format]

SOLS Podcasts 2007