by Marilyn Johnson

Jackson and Warren are part of a research team working under the direction of Irene M. Pepperberg, and ethologist and UA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, who compares parrots' mental powers to those of chimpanzees and dolphins. Pepperberg and Alex have been featured in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and they have captured the interest of national television shows such as ABC's "PrimeTime Live," and "20/20."

Few undergraduates at any American university are allowed to work alongside faculty doing productive research. But at the UA this summer, 108 students including Jackson and Warren rolled up their sleeves and applied classroom knowledge to their future careers.

They are participants in the Undergraduate Biology Research Program, an energetic effort to get UA students excited about biology by giving them a real-world research experience. As a bonus, they get paid to do it.

"The cool thing about it is it's real research, not just a token job where we're washing dishes," Warren says.

UA faculty in science, agriculture, and medicine for years have hired undergraduate researchers, paying wages entirely out of their own grant funding. Then a 1989 grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for $1.5 million over five years provided, among other things, money to pay half the cost of wages for students in biology labs. Faculty pay the other half.

The program started with a pilot project funded by the Biochemistry Department in 1988 with just 19 students working in the labs of 13 faculty. It has grown quickly since then, in part because additional funding was secured from the National Science Foundation, the deans of science, agriculture and medicine, and University-affiliated units such as the Center for Insect Science. There are now 140 potential faculty sponsors for students.

The program's growth underscores the effectiveness of teaching science by letting students actually do it, says Edgar J. McCullough, dean of the UA Faculty of Science. "Science is a hands-on endeavor; you can't tell people to read about it or do cookbook experiments and expect them to understand the fun and excitement of advancing knowledge in your field."

Clearly, science has anything but a reputation for fun and excitement in this country. Statistics show that student enrollment in U.S. science classes drops 50 percent between grades 10 and 12, then another 50 percent in college. This, when a national shortage of scientists and science faculty looms in the late 1990s and when international test scores show that our students rank dead last in the world in achievement in biology.

Undergraduate lab research offers payoffs to motivated students that go beyond wages. Warren, for example, is first author on a research paper recently submitted to a professional journal in the field in which she is majoring, speech and hearing science. That means she is considered a primary researcher on a project that analyzed five years of data on discourse produced by Alzheimer's patients. She began working on the data at the end of her freshman year under the direction of Kathryn A. Bayles, associate professor of speech and hearing sciences. She still works on that project as well as with Pepperberg.

As a result of that paper, Warren will also present her findings at the November convention of the American Speech Language Hearing Association in Atlanta, Bayles says.

"Publishing papers and attending meetings are some of the highlights of professional life," Bayles says, "so I'm tickled that she's going to get both of those experiences."

Few students achieve the distinction of being a first author even during graduate school. But it's not unusual for that to happen at the UA. Students in the Undergraduate Biology Research Program have published 24 journal papers since 1988, five of them as first authors, says Carol Bender, senior program coordinator. In addition, Bender adds, 34 posters and papers have been presented since 1989 at scientific conferences, where students have competed with full-fledged professionals; students were first authors on ten of them.

The sheer quantity of breakthrough research under way in UA laboratories accounts for undergraduates such as Warren having access to work that could lead to getting published. But without faculty support to underpin the program, few students could make such headway.

The amount of talent, analytical ability and independence that characterizes undergraduates who join the program may account for the faculty's general enthusiasm for hiring them, Bender says.

Biochemistry professor Marc E. Tischler, for example, says sophomore Teresa Isaias "absorbs information like a sponge." Isaias, a molecular and cellular biology major, plans a career in medicine or biological research. She joined Tischler's team at the Arizona Health Sciences Center in September 1990 as a freshman. Isaias works with Tischler on the wasting of muscle tissue under conditions of simulated weightlessness. The project is related to an experiment that will be performed on the space shuttle flight scheduled for September 1991.

The eyes of faculty sponsors tend to light up when they talk about their undergrad researchers.

"Every single student I've had in my lab has been terrific," says Elizabeth Vierling, who holds joint faculty appointments in the departments of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Biochemistry. Vierling, who has worked with four undergraduates on the effects of heat shock on plants, says students' questions as well as the results of their work often send faculty in new research directions. It's funny how it works out sometimes," she says. "When they do a great job it helps us expand."

For Vierling, the greatest satisfaction comes when students get their first experimental results. "They get to find out what it's really like to collect data and how all aspects of their sciences - their math, their chemistry and their biology - have to work together in doing lab work."

Because students can enter the program so early in their University careers, some stay in it as long as three years, Bender says. They are required to work a minimum of fifteen hours a week during the school year. That amount of time and effort gives undergraduates an edge in competence and confidence in the laboratory, opens up chances to get published and certainly looks good on resumes.

"I basically started out looking for something good to put on my resume," says Warren, who entered the UA as an English major. "But I've ended up liking this kind of work, so I've decided I want to get a doctorate and go into research."