Youth Academy visits BIOSS
During summer holidays 16 pupils made a journey into the microcosm of a cell
Anton is looking at a sea of sparkling green stars in the darkness, fascinated. He is exploring the microcosm of a cell. The 16-year-old is visiting BIOSS today together with 15 other participants from the Jugendakademie Bad Waldsee on an educational field trip led by director Bernd Friedrich.
The view through the ultra-modern microscope alone is worth getting up early, the girls and boys say. One after the other, they look at the same green-coloured channel proteins found in the human brain that Anton was marvelling at before.
The Jugendakademie Bad Waldsee was founded in 2001. The academy offers an enrichment programme especially geared toward outstanding and motivated pupils, from primary school to the sixth form. Every quarter, it designs a new programme focusing on one theme, offering the 440 kids currently attending a chance to deepen their already existing knowledge and to choose from a wide variety of excursions, activities and other offerings.
The pupils’ day at BIOSS was met with great interest by the kids, primarily because of the practical exercises. “Everything is so exciting,” says 15-year old Dorit. The Jugendakademie Bad Waldsee’s enrichment programme for outstanding pupils and the University of Freiburg’s partnership are examples of how rigid school frameworks can be made more flexible and changed for the better. Their common goal is to create networks and encourage interdisciplinary knowledge transfer.
The academy’s director, Bernd Friedrich, walks from lab to lab with the pupils, looking with them through the microscopes and joining them for the demonstrations on how to start a bacteria culture and isolate proteins, presented by the biologist and laboratory director, Andrea Weber, and Junior Professor Max Ulbrich, together with their assistants.
17-year-old Andreas is mesmerised by the small roundworms, which are only a millimetre in size under the microscope. “They are all hermaphrodites and can reproduce independently,” explains Dr. Andreas Eizinger from the Laboratory for Bioinformatics and Molecular Genetics. Only one worm out of 1,000 is male, says Eizinger. Andreas is determined to find him.
Dr. Gerald Radziwill coordinated today’s science day and is even leading a project station himself. “5th semester students have to do this experiment in their practical placement,” Radziwill points out. But this doesn’t intimidate the junior researchers. On the contrary, they are already completely focused on the project and excited to learn something new about biology.
