The Science Pawdcast

Season 6 Episode 39: Exploring Beluga Whales, Pet Myths, and Medical Lab Science with Mara Williams

• Jason Zackowski

Share episode

Send us a text

This episode uncovers the mysteries of beluga whale communication, exploring their unique melon structures and the signals they may convey. It also examines how companion animals influence adolescent participation in sports and features an interview with Mara Williams about the vital role of medical lab scientists.
• Beluga whale melon shapes as a form of communication
• Findings on companion animals impacting adolescents' sports involvement
• Insights from Mara Williams on life as a medical lab director
• Overview of the challenges facing the medical lab field today
• Encouragement for future scientists and appreciation for animal roles in human lives

Bunsen and Beaker Links to support us!

Join the Paw Pack!

Our Website!

www.bunsenbernerbmd.com

Sign up for our Weekly Newsletter!

Bunsen and Beaker on Twitter:

Bunsen and Beaker on TikTok

Support the show

For Science, Empathy, and Cuteness!
Being Kind is a Superpower.
https://twitter.com/bunsenbernerbmd

Speaker 2:

Hello science enthusiasts. My name is Jason Zukoski. I'm a high school chemistry teacher and a science communicator, but I'm also the dog dad of Bunsen and Beaker, the science dogs on social media. If you love science and you love pets, you've come to the right place. Put on your lab coat, put on your safety glasses and hold on to your tail. This is the Science Podcast. Hello everybody, welcome back to the Science Podcast. We hope you're happy and healthy out there.

Speaker 2:

This is episode 39 of season 6. It is so close to Christmas you can almost taste it. Well, I can taste Christmas because we've had a lot of chocolate in our house from the wonderful gifts our students give us on the last day. You know it's a good idea to pace yourself, but I can never do that If I get those little ball chocolates I forget the name of them. Chris would be able to tell me. You know what I'm talking about those little ball chocolates. Oh, they're so good. Tastes like happiness and diabetes. We won't have a family section today. Adam has been doing finals this last week and he is working and it's just time to get the podcast out. But just a fun little aside. Beaker and Bernoulli came to my school on Friday for the whole day the last day of classes and it was truly amazing and the kids loved those dogs so much and the dogs loved the kids back. It was wow. It's just so cool to see. Dogs are magic, All right.

Speaker 2:

Well, what's on the show this week In science news? Chris and I break down the head shapes of beluga whales. It's a really fun study and in pet science we look to see if there's any correlation between having a companion animal and a bunch of factors that may influence adolescence. Very cool. Our guest and ask an expert is program director for medical lab students, Mara Williams, and we get into some really interesting discussions about what that job entails and what medical lab students would do and why would. You would need people who work in a medical lab. Okay, bad joke, this one's terrible. What do whales need to stay healthy? Uh, vitamin c. Okay, on with the show, because there's no time like science time. This week in science news we're gonna go under the sea, but instead of a rather news, we're going to go under the sea, but instead of a rather tropical area, we're going to cold water and we're looking at beluga whale noggins. Is that correct, Chris? Beluga whale heads they're called melons.

Speaker 2:

They're called melons. That's their head.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's their head, it's their melon, it's the bulbous melon on their forehead.

Speaker 2:

So, like the Gen X put down, for somebody who was smart, you'd call them a melon head.

Speaker 1:

I'm not familiar with that term.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 1:

I did see a viral video of this gentleman and a person I'm assuming the girlfriend were in the aquarium and they were standing in front of the beluga whale exhibit and the whale was just swimming there looking at them and then he got down on one knee and the face, the facial expression of the beluga went into this big smile, like what it was like, so cute, and I saw that on social media.

Speaker 2:

Now I know you like dolphins. Dolphins are probably your favorite aquatic mammal. Mine for sure, is the beluga whale. I think they're just so smiley and cute.

Speaker 1:

Now a study has come out that maybe sheds light into their communication, which is super cool.

Speaker 2:

And we are going to be looking at their melon. As you said, it's their squishy fat-filled structure on top of their forehead. Previous research seems to show that melon aids in echolocation by directing sound waves, but today's study looks at how it creates visible expressions. So maybe that melon is cute to other belugas, chris.

Speaker 1:

Maybe it is, I'm sure it is. The study focused on developing a visual encyclopedia which documented various beluga melon expressions while they were observed in captivity, and they identified five distinct melon shapes. I'll list them flat lift, press, push and shake. So that reminds me of Dance Revolution, when you would go up, left down up and you were able to do all of those moves in an incredibly swift and excellent manner. I didn't know how you did it. I don't even know how you play video games Left to left up, toggle, all that. That just reminds me of that.

Speaker 2:

I'm not as good as I used to be, but I do remember playing a lot of Dance Revolution on this mat that we had in our house. That's good exercise, by the way.

Speaker 1:

The melon movement capabilities. They did something like a forward extension where the melon jut over their lips like a cap's brim, or they did a flattening motion where the melon compressed against their skull. Another movement was the vertical lift, so the melon rises like a fleshy top hat. That'd be interesting to see. I know so funny. And then jiggling, so the melon shakes which resembles jello.

Speaker 2:

Some lucky researchers, though it's a lot of work. They took these observations over a one-year period, from 2014 to 2015 at the Mystic Aquarium, and these observations involved four belugas. They took video footage of their social interactions and analyzed it to identify and classify these melon shapes. Surprisingly, the belugas produced an average of two melon shapes per minute during their social interactions. So they're talking away, looking at each other and changing the shape of the melon on their head. It's like raising eyebrows at somebody.

Speaker 1:

It is or giving side eye. So because 93% of the melon expressions occurred within another beluga's line of sight, that suggests that the shapes may serve as deliberate signals rather than involuntary responses. So it's purposeful communication between the belugas and we are a G-rated podcast. But the shaken press was linked to courtship and attracting a mate.

Speaker 2:

And they weren't sure. Shaken press, that's like shaking your booty. You said it not me no you said it, not me.

Speaker 1:

No, and they weren't sure what flat meant. That was less clear and that might require further study or looking for subtle changes, and that those subtle changes might be just difficult for us to understand or interpret.

Speaker 2:

The study suggests that these documented shapes might be just the tip of the iceberg, or tip of the melon, for understanding beluga melon use in the wild during when groups are foraging for food and when mothers are talking to their babies or interacting with their babies.

Speaker 1:

Because that would be further future research and implications. Right, how are these belugas communicating in the wild?

Speaker 2:

Another thing they're hoping to look at in the future is if there's a relationship between these melon expressions and how the belugas have such an extensive vocalization. They whistle, they chirp and they click. Their vocal abilities have earned them the nickname canaries of the sea, that's cute, that's so cute yeah there you go, everybody. Next time you see a beluga whale and it's pressing and shaking its melon at you, yeah, it really likes you. It really likes you a lot, so watch out.

Speaker 1:

Watch out Swim away, swim away. You can't. They're probably swimming way faster than you.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's science news for this week. This week in pet science a study came out that piqued my interest, chris, about companion animals and how they may or may not affect adolescent participation in sports. Now, I don't think I've mentioned to you why I chose this study, but here goes, ready, chris.

Speaker 1:

I'm ready.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I have a colleague. She's the biology expert in our school, jackie Shukin, very awesome teacher, and she was extremely sporty when she was young, I believe she was, like, really good at hockey and one of the she loves dogs. She's got a dog named Murphy. Murphy and Bunsen are buddies and when she was young she wanted a dog. So the story goes. I'm sorry if I'm throwing Jackie's parents under the bus, but Jackie's parents said that they couldn't get a dog because they were so busy with sports and it wouldn't be fair to the dog and the dog would have a rough life. And it wouldn't necessarily be good for the family either, because they wouldn't get to see the dog and the dog would have a rough life and it wouldn't necessarily be good for the family either, because they wouldn't get to see the dog a lot. And then the study popped up about how adolescents could be influenced or not by companion animals. So that's a long way to get there, but we're here right now. Did you have pets when you were a teen, chris?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we did, but I wasn't in sports.

Speaker 2:

Were you doing any clubs or anything like that, or working?

Speaker 1:

I worked, but I wasn't involved in any clubs.

Speaker 2:

no, I was, I played basketball for sure. Basketball was my big sport in high school A little bit of volleyball, track and field. I threw the heavy things. That was my job throw the stuff far. And I don't know if that was an excuse my parents made, but it took a while for us to get a family dog. We did eventually get one named Gwyn.

Speaker 1:

I know, but Gwyn was a gift to you at Christmas.

Speaker 2:

That's true, that's true.

Speaker 1:

And then how can you say no to a gift?

Speaker 2:

You can't. So that's how we got a dog. That is how you got a dog. I seem to remember a cat sneaking into our house under similar circumstances.

Speaker 1:

That is absolutely not true. That is absolutely not true you like to embellish the ginger story. I said, adam, we need to get this cat, we are going to get it. We need to cook up a plan that, in case dad is allergic to the cat, that Papa can take care of her until you move out and we'll start her on the food. And I said you. I said jason, we have found a cat, we love this cat. This is our plan. Would you be willing?

Speaker 1:

to and if and if you had said no, then we would have gone with plan b. But I really think we were getting ginger, regardless if she was going to come live with us or she was going to live with papa and just like a dog that you get as a gift at Christmas time.

Speaker 2:

The person can't say no to that kind of logic.

Speaker 1:

And it was in February, so it was the month of love.

Speaker 2:

There you go. Anyways, it all worked out. Ginger is awesome. We all love this cat to death. She's cute. All right, let's get back to the study, the data from this participation in sports effect on companion animals. They need to have a different title for this. It's a long title. Anyways, the data comes from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study. Guys, your acronyms are crazy long. That's five words in the data that they got it from and in the title too.

Speaker 1:

They're calling it the ABCD study.

Speaker 2:

I know I saw that that's cute. I love that that is cute. But the sample size was pretty big. We're like 8,500 adolescents, so that's decent for science. And, as I mentioned in the lead, they were going to determine the extent to which the type of companion animal influences family engagement in sports or other activities. So I believe the framework here was so. I believe the idea of the study maybe not so much was should you get a pet? But does the pet have an influence on kids if they're in sports or not? It'd be interesting.

Speaker 1:

And drum roll. The key findings were no significant relationship was identified. So they controlled for several relevant variables and they found that no meaningful connection was between the companion animal type and family involvement in sports or other activities. Also, the companion animal type and adolescent physical activity levels. And, lastly, no significant relationship identified between the companion animal type and screen time so it's both a good and bad thing.

Speaker 2:

The companion animal isn't taking kids away from sports due to cost or or how much time you have to have for a companion animal. But then on the flip side, I was a little surprised about the physical activity levels that a dog wouldn't necessarily increase the activity levels of the adolescent.

Speaker 1:

But I guess that that surprised me too.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

You usually would be like I'm gonna take care of the dog, I'm gonna feed the dog, I'm gonna give the dog water and I'm gonna take the dog for walks.

Speaker 2:

That's typically the argument that the child or adolescent would give to the parent in order to potentially get a dog but then, as thing as they do, those rules always fall to the parents, because, unless you're very militant about waking up the kid at six to feed the dogs and we don't do that with adam heck we don't even do that with him and his cat.

Speaker 1:

No, we feed the cat. We're up with her and with the writing was on the wall jason like. Right away. I'm like did you feed your cat? No, oh, so then I just moved all her stuff upstairs yeah yeah but also, adam was super busy in school.

Speaker 2:

He was had a full course load and he also was in band and he was in a million other things. And if we had forced the issue I think it could have been different. But how long does it take to feed a cat Like 20 seconds, when you're already up anyways? And oh boy, are we up anyways, aren't we Chris?

Speaker 1:

We are up anyways. Today we were up at 5 am because Bernoulli, for some reason, thought it would be a great idea to be awake.

Speaker 2:

Thanks, Bernoulli, I think he was saying mean words to Beaker because she was losing her mind on him. He would bark a couple times, or maybe she was like shut up, go back to sleep. What's the matter with you?

Speaker 2:

Maybe she was saying that she was like shut up, go back to sleep, what's the matter with you? Maybe she was saying that, but that just I guess it highlights the importance of the doing research on human animal interactions and not generalizing without data. I would have generalized with that getting a dog would be better for the physical activity of a person in your, your house, like a adolescent in your house, and it might pull them away from their screens. But it doesn't show that this is the case.

Speaker 1:

No, and so that's right. There's cautions against drawing those conclusions, and future studies should maybe incorporate detailed information about the human-animal relationship, which could include factors such as attachment levels and time spent with the animal, and also the animal's role within the family.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's right. I think if you got a fish and you're classifying that as a companion animal, that might be vastly different than a dog and even a cat, because cats will sleep. Cats go through life like a teenager, like when Adam was a teen. They worry about themselves and sleep all the time and use a litter box as opposed to the dogs that have to go outside.

Speaker 1:

Although Adam did not use a litter box, he definitely knows how to go to the bathroom.

Speaker 2:

Did you hear Adam grumbling that next semester he's got a biology's got a bio biology class at eight in the morning? He's like I'm gonna, my life is over. He was complaining about his 8 am class. So rough life for Adam coming up here. He might be up in time to ginger Chris he'll be up in time to feed ginger.

Speaker 2:

That's pet science for this week content there, and we have live streams every Sunday with our community. It's tons of fun. Also, think about checking out our merch store. We've got the Bunsen stuffy, the beaker stuffy and now the ginger stuffy. That's right, ginger the science cat has a little replica. It's adorable. It's so soft, with the giant fluffy tail, safety glasses and a lab coat. And number three, if you're listening to the podcast on any place that rates podcasts, give us a great rating and tell your family and friends to listen too. Okay, on with the show. Back to the interviews. It's time for Ask an Expert on the Science Podcast, and I have Program Director for Medical Lab Students and Scientists, mara Williams with us today. Mara, how are you doing?

Speaker 3:

I am well. Thank you so much, Jason.

Speaker 2:

Yay, where are you in the world? Where are you calling into the show from?

Speaker 3:

I'm calling from Pennsylvania, so I'm that kind of rectangular state that's adjacent to the East Coast. First capital of the United States before Washington DC is in Philadelphia.

Speaker 2:

Is Scranton in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 3:

It is, it's just up north of where I am right now.

Speaker 2:

So, aside from it being in the news for Canadians, because it's important in an upcoming election for you guys, many Canadians would know Pennsylvania from Scranton because of the office.

Speaker 3:

Oh, that's interesting, See, and I thought you guys would know it, because it's the birthplace of Joe Biden, but then that's a little obscure too.

Speaker 2:

I did know he was born there, which is ironic because I have no idea where Justin Trudeau was born. I have no idea right now. I'm going to have to Google that later. Mara, I introduced you as a program director for medical lab scientists. Would you mind just talking to us a little bit about your background and training in science?

Speaker 3:

Sure.

Speaker 3:

So I tell people I was born into it, because my mom is a pathologist, so she's one of the doctors that oversees a clinical laboratory, and then my dad is an engineer, so I grew up in a house that was full of microscopes and electronics and because I loved all of those things.

Speaker 3:

When I went to college there was a job where you could work with really complicated machinery and use that to do really cool hands-on science tests and it let you also help people every day but you didn't have to be part of the body fluids flying around, part of medicine, which makes for good TV but isn't actually really very much fun for me personally. So I ended up in my college selecting courses that would prepare me for that career and then I trained for a year at a hospital in California doing hands-on training in an accredited program. It had a special application process and we got lectures, but then when we did our actual work we were hands-on in the lab working with patient specimens, and I did that for a year and graduated and then worked in a clinical lab for a short time and I went back to grad school and got a master's in biology because I thought I wanted to teach and then I ended up at San Jose State University actually teaching people how to do medical lab science.

Speaker 3:

So that's where that part of my career started.

Speaker 2:

Hey, can I ask you about your time in a clinical pathology lab? Sure, Just for I have maybe a hazy idea about what goes on there. Could you walk us through what that would entail in your position then?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so there are different kinds of labs and depending on how large they are, they can be really simple or really complicated. So sometimes doctors have small labs in their offices, so sometimes you'll go in and they'll draw blood and give you results right there when you're sitting there, and that's because they have a few of those instruments in a back room, usually in the United States operated by a trained person like me, and I'm afraid I don't know what the rules are in Canada, but they often will have. Sometimes if the tests are simple enough, like a pregnancy test, they'll have a nurse or a medical assistant do the testing. But if it's something more complicated, where they're looking at counting all the cells in your blood or looking at your urine for an infection, you really sometimes have to look under the microscope for that and that is considered a more complicated test or a highly complex test, and so those kinds of things you need a trained person to do.

Speaker 3:

So you've got your doctor's offices that do sort of bread and butter things, really small things. And then there's places, like the hospital that I work at now, which are academic medical centers where we do the majority of our testing in-house and some of it's very specialized testing for cancer and other diseases. That are tests that we developed ourself with research that we did on site. But basically any test that a physician or another provider would order is done by a trained person in a specially inspected laboratory. So you can't just whatever. When someone orders a blood test it has to be done by a trained person in an environment that's controlled, sort of the same way like manufacturing of aspirin and Tylenol and other things that we consume is controlled, there's rules.

Speaker 3:

There's kind of two sides of the house in the pathology lab. So I live on the liquid side, if you will, where we're working with a lot of body fluids and actually doing a lot of what you think of as hands-on science mixing chemicals and making slides. Yes, exactly, we also are the gardeners of the lab. So we take all the microbiology and grow stuff up and do biochemical testing and see what is there. And then the other side of the house that is a supposed to take and that it is actually the thing that's causing the problem, because if it's the wrong thing, they need to go back and get the right thing, and if it's healthy they need to go back and find some other reason for why you're sick. And that is a whole separate group of people who deal with the tissue surgical kind of stuff.

Speaker 2:

So we're talking like your blood and urine side, and the other side is like things that have been cut out of people.

Speaker 3:

Yes, okay, yes, because I am trained to recognize like maybe 50 or 60 different kinds of cells that you can see in different body fluids. But people who work in the anatomic side, they are trained to recognize every tissue in the human body and what it looks like when it's normal and what it looks like when it has a disease and how those different diseases change the way it looks. So it's like pattern recognition times a million, wow.

Speaker 2:

It's literally what we teach. I taught this in science 10, like it's the hierarchy of systems in the body. Right you have cells, tissue organs. So you're on the cell side, where they're on the tissue side.

Speaker 3:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

Oh, I love that. Yes, okay, I got one more question, mara. All right, somebody sends you blood for a test. Actually, I've got so many questions. Okay, somebody sends you blood. Do you slap it on a microscope first? Does it go through a machine? Does it depend on what you're looking for?

Speaker 3:

Okay, so in the US I can't just do tests on you.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

A doctor or a nurse or someone who's a healthcare provider has to say I'm asking this question and I need you to do test X and that test is linked back to a diagnosis. So there are labs in some states the United States where you can get what are called unregulated tests, basically where you can just order are called unregulated tests, basically where you can just order a test for yourself.

Speaker 2:

But most of the time you just bring your blood in and say please test my blood.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so there are actually places a lot of the lifestyle medicine things where they're saying, oh, give us a blood sample and we'll tell you how you can eat for the appropriate way for your blood type. That's right.

Speaker 2:

Which, by the way, is Are you a caveman type? Exactly Thing will check your blood.

Speaker 3:

So some of the labs that do that testing are actually unregulated and they don't have trained people doing the work they just do on the job. But they don't have untrained people. They do on the job training instead of the kind of formal training that most people working in a clinical setting get, and kind of formal training that most people working in a clinical setting get, and so that's like a whole separate kind of thing.

Speaker 3:

But when I get a tube of blood, the most important thing that I'm checking it for, honestly, is just to make sure that I know who it came from and what I'm supposed to do with it. So always comes with a piece of paper or an electronic order that has a list of all the things that I'm supposed to do and that's where my job starts. So the first, the absolute first thing I always have to do is look at the tube and look at the paper and make sure they match, because that's really important, right? Because you don't want to report out results that belong to someone else. That causes all kinds of problems.

Speaker 2:

Right, it's the person and the blood is two different things. And you're like, oh man, something's wrong with your blood, but it's not the right person.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and that can get really confusing because sometimes you'll have a parent and a child that have the same name, that come in to get their blood drawn on the same day, and then when you're labeling the tubes and putting all the paperwork together, you have to be really careful that the right stuff gets with the right person.

Speaker 2:

I never even thought of that, yeah.

Speaker 3:

So huge number one, most important thing to get right. Thing number two I look at is this the right thing to ask the question that I'm supposed to be asking? So, for example, sometimes we need a liquid blood sample because of the instrument that I need to use to test it, and sometimes I need a clotted blood sample because when blood goes through the process of forming a clot, a lot of the protein gets pulled together into a mass and I can spin the blood down and pull out a lot of that protein. Spin the blood down and pull out a lot of that protein, and then what's left behind isn't a much cleaner, clearer fluid and I can do tests on that where I shine light through that fluid and it is a little bit easier If all that protein is still in the fluid. Sometimes shining the light through it doesn't work as well. It's more cloudy and I don't have as much discrimination in terms of what I can see in terms of differences. Does that make sense? Yeah, I need to make sure I have the right kind of blood and I need to make sure that, if it's liquid blood, that they kept it liquid with the right thing.

Speaker 3:

I'll give you an example as to why. You know that calcium is really important for our muscles to move right. So if you don't have enough calcium, your heart will stop beating. You can't move your arms and legs. It's a bad situation. It's also a neurotransmitter. It does a lot of important things.

Speaker 2:

Go calcium.

Speaker 3:

Yes, so sometimes to keep blood liquid we put in a chemical that binds the ball of calcium because it stops blood clotting all the calcium because it stops blood clotting. But then if you want to measure calcium it's zero. And we know that can't be true because you're not dead right. So sometimes I'll look at a sample and I'll be like I can't do that test on this thing, I'm so sorry, so I have to get past that. And then, once I know all of that is done, I'll then get my sample and process it sometimes spin it down, sometimes not and choose whatever method my lab has validated for that particular question and then perform what test needs to get done. And that can be anything from sticking it on one end of an automated track and getting an electronic answer, or it can mean actually pipetting drops of blood out into a cartridge or a test tube or whatever reagents I need to work with and doing a fairly extensive workup. That's all manual, so it just depends on what question I'm asking.

Speaker 2:

I'm so thankful you took some time to paint a picture because it seems mysterious Like I've had my blood drawn and they have to test some stuff and it goes away. I don't know where it goes. It goes to somebody like you, I guess. I have one more question before the next one. Is there like a type of test you love doing because it's rare or fun to do?

Speaker 3:

Oh, that's an interesting question.

Speaker 2:

Like you never get to do it and you're like woohoo, it's the thing, it's the I don't know. I don't know what your job does.

Speaker 3:

I think not exactly that. So again, this is more of a commercial thing. But to make something commercially viable you have to do a certain amount of it, Otherwise it's not worth it financially. So there's very rarely a thing where we don't do it very often because they're not going to keep that in house. If it's something, that's quite rare and got you.

Speaker 3:

But and this becomes a bit macabre, but stay with me, I promise it won't it'll seem maybe less weird if I explain a little. If we find something really unusual or strange, we're, then that's really exciting. So, for example, where I live, it's very unusual to find that someone has malaria, because actually we have the mosquitoes that can carry malaria parasites we have the anopheles mosquitoes but what we don't have is people who are chronically infected with malaria that live in our community and so because of that and we have cold winters so we have time to treat people if they come here with malaria there was actually a case of felsiper malaria that was transmitted last year in Maryland, which I find fascinating. But it's like a little weird to get excited when you find out someone has a horrible disease, but that's kind of part of the job. So every once in a while you'll find something and you'll just tell everyone around you oh my gosh, you have to come see this because it's rare and unusual and it might be something you would see once a year or twice a year. So malaria is like that.

Speaker 3:

There's a little what they call North American malaria Babesia, which actually is not just in North America but we have it in the Ixodes ticks. I don't know if it goes up as far north as you guys are, but it goes up pretty far north into the center of the US, like Wisconsin, michigan and all up and down the Eastern seaboard, and sometimes there's a little parasite called Trichomonas vaginalis that we'll find in a urine and it moves in a very particular way called darting leaf motility. So if you find one that's alive because it doesn't stay alive very long you will always call everyone to come and look. You have to come see this thing. I think those are the main things.

Speaker 3:

Sometimes there'll be interesting cases too, so it's not necessarily doing something unusual that you'll find I don't know, but there'll be stories like that. I live in the Hershey area, which has a lot of dairy cattle and dairy farms, and we had a case of a kid who was anemic and when they did the investigation they discovered the child was drinking two gallons of milk every day. And it turns out there's proteins in milk that bind to iron and so that kid was just drinking so much milk that even though there was iron in some of the food they were eating, it was not sufficient, it was just too much milk.

Speaker 2:

They must have lived on a dairy farm, getting straight from the cow.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, no, seriously, that is exactly that's a lot of milk. I mean, I couldn't drink two gallons of milk a day even if I really tried. So yeah, that was a commitment to milk, so just stuff like that. It's interesting.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, like malaria, is a weirdo parasite. So when you do, you see the little parasite yeah, is it. Would it be dead or alive? I can see how shocking that would be. You're like checking blood and you're like what did I just look at?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so when you actually look at it on the slide, it's been fixed to the slide surface and it's been stained, so it's definitely dead. It's super dead yeah, yeah but sometimes, like with the trichomonas example, that's wet mount and that's just a little guy swimming around. It's so freaky yeah it really is it really is, but it's also cool. I don't want to like.

Speaker 2:

Oh, I'm, if you've been following, if people have been following Bunsen. We're all in on parasites now.

Speaker 3:

So I know, when I saw that was so interesting because we actually do sometimes see those kinds of cysts, or sometimes you'll see them in people's brains, and that was huge, like literally and figuratively, it was wild.

Speaker 2:

We were so unprepared. When the surgeons okay, this is what it is, and it took my brain like 10 seconds to track what he actually told us, I was just glad, we're just glad it wasn't cancer.

Speaker 3:

I'm just glad they didn't try to needle biopsy or something, because that has had added sand can be incredibly. I don't know how it works in dogs, but I know that in people it can spark an incredible immune reaction.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, they said, if it bursts or they biopsied it, bunsen would have died immediately.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, okay, so similar physiology there.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, he went into, yeah, like an immune shock there. Yeah, he went into, yeah, like an immune shock. Yeah yeah, anaphylaxis, basically. Yeah, sorry to just uh sidetrack to bunsen, but our lives are all about parasites now. So without with the the huge story about bunsen there, I appreciate you giving us a little background about the job. I have a little bit of fascination of the macabre so I totally get it. But healthcare is all about keeping people from an untimely death and finding those odd bits in people's bloods and urine it just helps the diagnosis and treatment later on.

Speaker 3:

So it's all for good, yeah, hmm, and I think one thing people don't appreciate and maybe this is scary and that's why we don't think about it is doctors often have no idea what's going on with a patient. If you have something like strep throat or something run of the mill, they know how to treat you and get you better, but they're not like scientists. They don't actually always know they don't. They're not like scientists. They don't actually always know all the whole story like cause and effect and things like that. They just know what's going to keep you alive and maybe how to get you better. If they have information that is framed a certain way, it's one of those jobs that's more of an art than a science, and so I like what I do because I know that if I put out a test result, it means what it means. There is no gray area. It's black or white, this or that, and I think that's very satisfying to me. And I think that when you go into medicine sometimes you actually don't get to have that as much.

Speaker 2:

One second. Yeah, sorry, just give me about 20 minutes, okay, okay. Oh sorry, mara, I'm still at my school. The janitor's trying to come in to clean my room.

Speaker 3:

Oh.

Speaker 2:

That's okay, my apologies there, I can cut. My audio will cut out, so your end answer will be fine, don't worry about it, okay, yeah, do you feel when I said that it cut off anything you were saying or were you done your thought? No, I'm fine thing I was just gonna add on, I guess is uh, I feel I've heard that before that, um, like medicine, doctors, it's, it's like an art, um, but you have a better paintbrush with people like you, giving them information I think that, um, another way to think about it is, a doctor is somebody who takes a lot of pieces of information a lot of and weaves them together into a story.

Speaker 3:

And they're trying to tell a story where they can't read the book and they're trying to figure out if it's a book they read before or maybe it's a different book and they don't have all the chapters. It's just very complicated. So they rely on the lab for somewhere around 70% of the information they use to make decisions. Imaging is hugely important for a lot of diseases. I don't want to leave out my anatomic path folks, because often when you read case studies, it's the pathologist that's actually able to tell the whole story because they have all the pieces to put together. So it's group work, it's not an individual person. Again, doesn't make for great TV, but I think it's wonderful because I think students in particular will often think if I don't want to be a doctor or a nurse, I can't do medicine, and that's so untrue, yeah.

Speaker 2:

We were literally looking at with microscopes today the first time my my little grade nine honors kids got to use microscopes and they were so excited. And then one of the kids was looking at a blood slide Cause we have prepared slides for the kids and he's like I'm Dexter, I'm like that's one path you can take with a microscope. Who's from that TV show?

Speaker 3:

Oh yeah, and I think if people like forensics, they will love lab medicine, because forensics is what you do after a crime has been committed and something bad has happened, but lab medicine is something that you do to figure out how to prevent something bad from happening. And if you eat a bunch of pepperoni pizza for dinner and then you have chest pain or an uncomfortable feeling in your stomach, you can do a handful of lab tests and know if that's a heart attack or if it's just indigestion. I can tell you that answer. And if it is a heart attack, I can tell you how, to a certain extent, how bad it is, and then, with my EKG friends, we can talk about what part of your heart is broken.

Speaker 3:

And so we can prevent a lot of stuff from going south, and I like being in that position. I don't want to clean up the mess after something bad has happened. That's not for me.

Speaker 2:

I like that framing. We do need the reactive scientists, but you're definitely on the proactive side.

Speaker 3:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

Love it Mara. Right now you are this program director. Could you talk to us a little bit about what's going on there?

Speaker 3:

Sure, whenever you have a program like mine where you're training people to work in a laboratory, you have to make sure that the training is done in a way that meets a national standard, because in the US and in Canada actually there is a national exam that you have to take in order to be certified to do this work. And the only way to qualify for that exam in the US is either to do a very specific kind of on-the-job training or to go through an accredited program. And if your program is accredited, it means you have lectures, you have labs, you have like an educational plan and objectives, and then those are evaluated on a periodic basis for how effective they are, and you have to answer to another group of professionals like yourself who basically set a standard that you have to meet for the education that you're providing. So my job is making sure that we meet those standards. That is the program director's job. Secondarily, my job is to make sure that my students have all the training and information that they need to go out and practice in the profession.

Speaker 3:

I have two instructors that work with me who do a lot of hands-on training with the students before they go to the lab so that they know how to pipette and they know how to streak a plate with bacteria and they know how to look through the microscope.

Speaker 3:

And we train them on some of the simpler blood smears and other things that we can do outside of the clinical setting so that when they arrive for their hands-on training in the hospital they can look at really complicated, tricky things and they're very quickly going to be able to learn how to recognize normal or not normal.

Speaker 3:

And so I do a lot of paperwork documenting that we're doing all these things. I'm responsible for organizing the curriculum. I work with my instructors to make sure that we're executing on what we've said we're going to do. I assess the students to see if they've learned what they need to learn, and then at the end I meet with my instructors and with former students and current students and people that work at my hospital that work with them, people that work at other labs that work with my graduates, and I get feedback from them how well prepared were these people? What's something we could have done better? And then I have to take all of that feedback and come up with a development plan or a way of changing the program or improving the program to keep getting better at what we do.

Speaker 2:

I love it. So you're more at the top. Do you do teaching or are you more organizing, delegating, planning what the teachers will teach? Both, okay, all right. Everything all at once, everywhere.

Speaker 3:

Of course, of course. So my program has 10 students in it and I am what's called a hospital-based program, so I am literally located in the medical center and I do have my great instructors and actually a lot of my pathologists and fellows and staff who work in the lab who are able to lecture for me, but whenever there's a lecture that's not covered by one of those people, it's me, so I fill in all the little gaps there are, and the one thing I don't do is I don't do hands-on training in the laboratory. Right now, I've mostly been doing lecturing and things like that, but that's okay, we're super busy. The other thing that I'm managing right now is admissions to the program, because Because, believe it or not, for students that start in June, we're already doing interviews, which it's like hard for me to wrap my brain around, but I get it Some of our students are in their senior year of college, and so they want to know where they're going to school next year. I understand the urgency of that.

Speaker 2:

Oh Okay, Love it. I guess my other question is related to your job as being program director. Do you said that this these the jobs of being a medical lab scientist. They're in demand. Is that true across the board or just in your area?

Speaker 3:

There's a national shortage of laboratory scientists in the United States. I would be surprised if that were not true in Canada as well, and the reason for that is again this is where I'll speak to the US problem. I don't know how it works in Canada. To be honest with you. You have a national registry. The way things work in the US, each state has its own rules about registry and licensure. So, depending on what state you're in like in a state like Texas, which doesn't really regulate very much, you can train on the job and you can do work in the lab and it's relatively easy to get into the profession. But because of that, they are not as well paid as people who work in pharmaceutical companies or biomedical research or other areas that would require a similar educational background. So when people are choosing, do I want to work at a fancy biotech company or do I want to work at this hospital where I have to do weekends or work different shifts and I'm not going to make as much money I? They choose more money and no weekend work.

Speaker 2:

It's like Mr Krabs money.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, exactly, and there are states like California that really limit who can do training, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, because this is the sort of thing where you do want to do it.

Speaker 2:

You can't screw this up. People will die.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that does put a certain cast on things up that people could die. Well, yeah, that does put a certain cast on things. But California has gotten itself in this position where it takes so much work to train someone to do the job that most labs can't afford to spend the time to do it. And so over time what's happened is they've had more people retire than are coming into the country. And then another thing that happened in California which happened because of 9-11 of all things is people used to do this thing where California had its own exam, and because people in this profession were in such demand, there was a special visas that you could get to come work in the US if you were able to qualify for a license in certain states. So people would come over from mostly the Philippines, but other countries where they met the standard for California licensure. They'd take the test, they'd get a California license and then they'd apply for a visa and come work in that state. When 9-11 hit, they stopped allowing people to come to the US just to take licensing exams. They refused to give the visas anymore and allow that to happen, and so the number of people coming from outside the US to do the work went down a lot, which as an aside.

Speaker 3:

People talk about immigration and I always get a little twitchy because when I look at my laboratory workforce, especially in certain places like California, most of the people there came from outside the US, because we don't have much training capacity here and what's happened over time and what continues to happen now is people. It's very hard to find a way into the profession and then, once you're there, there's a lot of exits, which is great. If you have the training, you could go work at a pharma company, you could go work doing biotech research, you could go work in sales. There are a million things that you could do, but all of those take you out of the hospital setting, which means I now have to train another person at Hershey Medical Center, which is not great. So in terms of staff turnover and things like that, that is something that can pull people out of the profession. So there's huge demand for this and I would say it's worth looking at what's happening in your local area and see if there's big demand, because if there is, it's interesting work.

Speaker 2:

There you go. Yeah, I'm always as a teacher. As kids are leaving my high school classroom, I love to tell them okay, here's something you've maybe never thought of that you could do in science, right? Yeah, this is just one more avenue, and I love that, yeah.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and I think when you hit university, people encourage you to do research. If you're good at science and I married a researcher, so there's nothing wrong with them. They're great people but it requires a certain personality and mindset, like you have to want to stand on the edge of a cliff with your toes hanging off and build the next step in front of you.

Speaker 3:

And I like to know that my stuff is going to work when I walk in the lab. I know that 95% of the time when I set up an instrument and I'm doing my tests, it's going to work. And if it doesn't work, I have a guy on the phone I can call who's going to help me figure out why. And you have to just love that like living on the edge, and I do not.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, oh, nothing worked today. That was like yesterday. Maybe tomorrow.

Speaker 3:

Yes, yes, deeply dissatisfying for me. I love being able to go home and say, oh my gosh, today there were 14 babies born in the hospital. They all are healthy and we're sending them home. It was so boring and I love it.

Speaker 2:

That's cool. That's good advice for folks maybe who are younger listening to the show. Yeah, we have a couple standard questions we ask all our guests about on the Science Podcast, and the first one is to share a story with us about pets from their life. Do you have a pet story for us?

Speaker 3:

I have a pet that we have. We are a cat family and we usually have two cats and we've been trying for 25 years to have two cats that like each other and so far have been unsuccessful.

Speaker 2:

Oh no.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, but one of our cats is a wonderful, sweet, we don't know what kind of cat. We got him from the shelter cat, who's a little calico kitty, and basically spent COVID sitting next to my oldest child letting them pet her and pet them through. Covid, so my oldest child's freshman year of high school was sitting in their room at their desk with their cat next to them petting their cat while they went to school.

Speaker 3:

online the are. We call her s'mores, cause she's white and graham cracker Brown and a little bit of splotches of chocolate here and there and she is the emotional support kitty for my oldest. So very good cat, and she does. She tolerates the rest of us, but it's definitely my oldest child that she likes the most.

Speaker 2:

That is so sweet.

Speaker 3:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

That was a tough time for kids. I can't imagine, Like I taught through COVID and I would be hey guys, let's go, and I'd have 30 blank screens I don't even know if the kids are there or if they're listening or if they're sleeping and to be isolated like that was rough. I'm glad that your daughter had a friend during that time.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, Our youngest son, Adam, was still in high school when that happened. Our youngest son Adam was still in high school when that happened and he became really close with Bunsen and Beaker because he was home all the time and they were so happy, of course, so happy. That was. The greatest time for dogs was COVID.

Speaker 3:

Yes, yes, our cat too. My oldest now has gone off to college this year and our cat misses them so much. Yeah, so they come home on the weekends and play with the kitty.

Speaker 2:

That's a sweet story. Thank you for sharing, sure. As we close, we challenge all of our guests to share a super fact with us. It's something that you know that when you tell people, it blows their mind a bit. Do you have a super fact for us?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, but it's not so much a science one, it's just more of a how things work thing.

Speaker 2:

That's cool.

Speaker 3:

Whenever the American president flies somewhere on a plane, one of the things that the Secret Service does to prepare for the presidential visit is they call the trauma center that's nearest to whatever venue the president's going to be in, they tell them the blood type of the president and they say put some blood aside for the president while they're here.

Speaker 3:

They're going to be here from this time to this time? No way. So this happened while I was a student, and so for a day we had a unit of blood with a post-it on it that said for the president sitting in our refrigerator, and he didn't get shot or anything, no, so it was fine, but I just thought this is wild and I wonder if it's a prank call. Could this not be real? But it was true, the president was coming that day and we were the closest trauma center. So which?

Speaker 2:

president, was it or can you tell me Clinton?

Speaker 3:

I can't tell you the blood type because of confidentiality, that was what I was going to ask.

Speaker 2:

That's fascinating. You would know the blood type of the president. Isn't that wild? And the thing that's so funny about that is we're a trauma center we have like 75, probably have unlimited amount of all the blood exactly.

Speaker 3:

We're not gonna give him type specific if he shows up, because it takes us about an hour to establish the type anyway.

Speaker 2:

So it's, the whole thing was just hilarious to me I wonder if the prime minister of canada, they call ahead and they're like, I don't know if they're that important, they're like. They probably just like get some Tim Hortons coffee and poutine ready for them. They're going not blood, isn't?

Speaker 3:

that crazy.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's wild. I love that. That is a super fact that is. I love that that. Thank you so much, mara Sure, I want to thank you so much for being a guest today. This has been so much fun. I've learned a lot of a very important role in our healthcare system. Mara, are you on social media at all yourself? Can people follow you or connect with you?

Speaker 3:

Not me, but if they want to learn more about this. I think there's a couple of American societies that have a lot of information. The best stories coming out of the lab are usually from the microbiology side, so I would say the American Society for Microbiology, ASM. They're a great resource if you just want to read about weird case studies and things like that, Because they have a lot of the ooey-gooey's going on there. They're a great resource if you just want to read about weird case studies and things like that.

Speaker 2:

Ooh.

Speaker 3:

Because they have a lot of the ooey-gooey's going on there. You can look at Hershey Medical Center in Pennsylvania if you want to look at what an academic medical center works on, because there's a lot of interesting things going on at our medical center. Because the Hershey Company wanted to partner with Pennsylvania State University to put a medical center in a rural area and because of that we became this giant. All things to all people place. So lots of interesting research. We've got a cancer center. There's tons of stuff to see there. And then if you go out and search for the American Society for Clinical Lab Science, they have contests every year for cell identification and some more kind of nerdy medical lab things.

Speaker 2:

Oh, thank you so much for being a guest today. I so appreciate it.

Speaker 3:

Oh, you're very welcome. It was a pleasure to talk about my job. I hope somebody hears this and thinks that sounds like it would be interesting.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

We're looking for recruits, you're looking for people. Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2:

That's it for this week's show. Thanks for coming back week after week to listen to our show. Special thanks to our top tier supporters on the Paw Pack. If you want to support us, check out the link in the show notes. And, as always, we would love to tell Burge, Brenda Clark, Anne Uchida, Peggy McKeel.

Speaker 1:

Terry Adam, debbie Anderson, sandy Breimer, tracy Leinbaugh, marianne McNally Fun Lisa, shelly Smith, julie Smith, diane Allen, brianne Haas, linda Sherry, carol McDonald, catherine For science, empathy and cuteness.