Teaching three grade levels isn’t typically a travel-intensive job, but Bruce Boehne has nonetheless found a way. A popular science and math teacher at Zion Lutheran Middle School for the past six years, Boehne is constantly journeying about, whether he’s taking his kids to a major city every year as 8th-grade sponsor or visiting various research labs for lessons he can pass along to his students.
So you’ve been visiting a lot of labs recently.
Well, last summer I was at UT Southwestern for a fellowship, where I worked from 9 to 5 for two months doing real lab research. I was doing RNA extraction from mouse muscles. It was heart disease research. Heart muscle, when it’s damaged, doesn’t grow back, but skeletal muscle does. We were looking for the RNA that signals to repair tissue, so someday down the road, maybe they can inject some RNA into someone who has had a heart attack and trigger the repair of the heart muscle. And I visited the FDA food safety labs fairly recently, out there in Washington, D.C., and Maryland.
What goes on out there?
You know, testing food, testing bacteria. Got a lecture from the guy who invented the nutrition label on boxes. And I visited an experimental farm in Maryland with just herds of cloned animals. Cloned sheep, cloned cows, everything. About any animal you could name, they’ve got clones of. They’re testing whether food from cloned animals is safe.
Really? The FDA is running clone farms?
They’re doing all sorts of stuff. There was a guy at the FDA studying meat tenderness, for example. He puts a chunk of meat in the bottom of a trash can filled with water and suspends 100 grams of high explosives over it, then blows it up, and the shockwave from the explosion tenderizes the meat. So you get this meat you can cut with your fork.
At any point during this FDA visit did the words “mad science” come up?
(Laughs) I tell you, right now they can only do it with small amounts of meat, but they’re trying to get it so they can tenderize a few hundred pounds of meat at a time. With dynamite. The shockwaves also kill all the micro-organisms, so it’s better preserved. All the stuff that could’ve spoiled the meat is dead.
Would you say that’s the most interesting trip you’ve gone on recently?
Well, that’s tough to say. I just finished this zero G thing.
Zero G thing?
Where a bunch of us science teachers from the metroplex got to experience weightlessness. We went up in an 747 that’d had its insides gutted, and then it just flew almost straight down, and it was like the gravity of the moon inside. A CNN cameraman was there videotaping the whole thing.
Do you do much lab work with your students?
Oh yeah, the kids love it. These trips let me bring back all sorts of cool experiments to try. That’s the thing — you need to get them fired up about it, and to do that, you have to show them science is out there, not just some textbook. It’s all around them. I’m trying to bring the outside in, is where I’m at as a teacher.
