Terra

Brain Storm

Inspired by neuroscience

(Photo: Jim Folts)

Like a lot of undergrads, Taralyn Tan is footing her college bills with loans, scholarships and part-time jobs. But while most students are pulling shifts at the espresso bar or pizza parlor, Tan is sequencing genes in a biochemistry lab.

The fourth-year biochemistry/biophysics major and University Honors College student is investigating livestock genetics. In OSU’s animal sciences laboratory, she assists Professor Fred Stormshak in the search for markers of atypical mating behavior in sheep, a collaborative study with Oregon Health and Science University and the U.S. Sheep Experiment Station in Idaho.

As she lifts a tray of dripping microfuge tubes from a water bath and transfers them to a PCR (polymerase chain reaction) machine, Tan explains the intricacies of the research, funded by the National Institutes of Health: “cutting up” strands of DNA from purified animal tissue, ligating (attaching) the pieces to strips of synthetic DNA, and then amplifying (replicating) the DNA to obtain the genetic sequences of interest. She seems as conversant in mRNA, bubble PCR and sexually dimorphic nuclei as most 21-year-olds are with iPod, MySpace and Bluetooth.

“Her vocabulary is hard to wrap your mind around,” says Kevin Ahern, senior instructor and Tan’s academic advisor. “She’s teaching me words.” She has impressed others as well. Tan has received OSU’s Presidential Scholarship and a nationally competitive Goldwater Scholarship. In 2008 USA Today selected Tari for its second-team All-USA College Academic Team.

The only thing more striking than her scientific fluency is her cool assuredness in the lab. This forest of flasks is, without a doubt, Tan’s habitat. She seemed destined for science as early as second grade. The oldest child of an IT manager and school-teacher in Salem, Oregon, little Tari loved dissecting owl pellets. The 7-year-old also authored a story about a lunar monster who was fearsome, not because he roared and gnashed his teeth, but because he ate gravity.

Her fate was sealed on the first day of high school chemistry when the teacher performed a series of spectacular chemical reactions. Watching, wide-eyed, as the compounds morphed from clear to pink through all the colors of the rainbow, she thought: “Wow, that’s so cool! Things you can’t see are governing the reactions.” When her 16th birthday rolled around, she shunned the usual “girl” gifts and asked for a chemistry set. “Are you sure?” her mother asked, shaking her head in disbelief.

“My mom thought that was the weirdest thing,” Tan says, grinning.

At OSU, Tan has never doubted her devotion to laboratory science. “I cannot envision a better undergraduate experience. I’ve been in a lab every single day since my first day as a freshman. All my friends are working in labs. You can start by taking research for credit, or you can start by washing glassware. Kevin says all undergrads need to do research.” During the summer, Tan participated in OSU’s annual Howard Hughes Medical Institute research program.

But her longtime intention to become a pediatrician was rocked after a summer 2007 internship in India. Two months shadowing doctors in the southern state of Tamil Nadu opened her eyes to certain realities of medicine that clashed with her own disposition. At clinics in two Indian hospitals, one for leprosy patients, Tan became restless watching the same symptoms, diagnoses and treatments over and over. “There was so much repetition — 100 cases of vitiligo (a chronic loss of pigment) in the skin clinic, for instance,” she says. “I realized that just seeing runny noses all day in general pediatrics wouldn’t suit my interests.”

Shaken, she headed back to Corvallis for her senior year in the throes of an identity crisis.

The crisis was quickly resolved. A teaching assistantship in biochemistry awaited her that autumn, and it gave her the “missing puzzle piece,” she says. “I loved teaching college-level biochemistry. I loved putting my own spin on the material so that students would get it. It was so satisfying to see those ‘ah-ha’ moments.”

Now, rather than working with little kids as a physician, she plans to work with college kids as a professor while conducting research in neuroscience. With her minor in psychology, Tan is especially keen on studying chemical pathways of perception, how the brain registers pain, for instance, or senses heat and cold.

“The human brain is the final frontier,” she says. “It’s the last black box for scientific discovery.”

Tan has launched an “unhoused” sorority, Sigma Delta Omega, for OSU women majoring in science. For details visit oregonstate.edu/groups/sigmadeltaomega