Busy, Busy Bees

They make honey, sure, but in their spare time they sniff for explosives

Inside the Rothenbuhler Bee Lab with Brian Smith

"I think basic research is extremely important to maintain an infrastructure of knowledge about the world around us. The findings might not be applicable now, but down the road they might be.

"What I came to this position wanting to set up was a lab with strong representation in the applied world," Brian Smith, director of the Rothenbuhler Honey Bee Research Lab, says, and that's exactly what he's doing.

When the central research and development organization for the U.S. Department of Defense approached Smith with a research proposal, few could've imagined the resulting project existing outside of a science fiction novel. Describing his research project, Smith quips, "Science fiction is becoming a reality!"

"I think basic research is extemely important to maintain an infrastructure of knowledge about the world around us. The findings might not be applicable now, but down the road they might be."

With a three-year grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Smith set out to find out if insects could be used for search and rescue and to detect artificial chemicals-specifically, manufactured explosives.

Having completed the first phase of the project, Smith and his colleagues have determined that it is indeed possible to train bees and moths to recognize chemicals and cadaver odors. The project is now in its second phase, the development of an application.

Linking up with engineers, Smith has been able to use a robotic vehicle as a guide to locate odors, using electrodes in the insect's brain as sensors. Though the project itself predates the Bioterrorism Initiative and there are no immediate plans to apply the finding, such research has obvious ramifications during wartime.

This project also embodies Smith's overall research philosophy, which marries basic research's pursuit of general knowledge to the social responsibility of applied science. "I think basic research is extremely important to maintain an infrastructure of knowledge about the world around us. The findings might not be applicable now, but down the road they might be. I also feel quite strongly that since our research is funded by the public, we have to give something back."

Teaching is another way Smith gives something back. With a strong affiliation with the Introductory Biology Program, and ith three graduate students, six postdoctoral researchers, and several undergraduates all working on a range of projects in basic and applied areas, Smith shows a genuine commitment to students. He also has no qualms when it comes to confronting the controversy of teaching evolution. Smith teaches Honors Organismal Biology 116. "I tell people the first day," he says, "that you can't understand modern biology without understanding evolutionary mechanisms. I told my students point blank, 'I don't expect you to believe evolution, but I expect you to understand it.'" This year, Smith used the evolution of disease organisms such as HIV, tuberculosis, and smallpox as a model.

A central focus of the Bee Lab is the use of the honey bee as an invaluable economic insect which contributes tens of billions of dollars a year to crop production, including cattle feed and fruit and vegetable farming. Bees, Smith explains, are livestock, which makes the control of breeding important but underestimated. As a part of the Lab's commitment to applied research, Smith lauds the efforts of staff apiarist Susan Cobey, a honey bee breeding expert who has been instrumental in developing techniques for selecting genetic lines of bees for good crop pollination, disease resistance, or aggressiveness (a famous example would be Tanzania's "African killer" bees). One of the key goals of the Bee Lab is education, which is why teaching beekeepers in industry about the basics of bee breeding is such a priority.

Because the neural structure of bees is similar to mammals and humans, olfactory-based orientation processes in bees have implications across the species barrier. Using invertebrates as a simpler-but not, Smith insists, simple-model system for basic biomedical research is a rapidly expanding area of study.

Smith is interested in the interfacing of biological, computational and engineering sciences to solve problems important to researchers in the biosciences, such as communication systems for parapalegics. Smith looks forward to involvement in the new Mathematical Biosciences Institute (MBI). "I was very excited to hear about the Institute, and immediately affiliated myself with it." Mathematical tools, Smith says, provide a stronger framework for understanding and formulating biological principles. Interdepartmental research is extremely important to Smith: "Reaching out to establish ollaborative relationships among different fields is going to be the wave of the future."

-Natalie Corvington