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Advancing Beyond The Name - Dr. Ann L. Miracle
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(April, 2005) Mention that you are doing research that involves the water flea or the fathead minnow, and likely you will get a few puzzled chuckles or a suggestion that your work could be honored with a "golden fleece" award. Names have a way of influencing significantly people's initial perceptions about the value of a thing or of even a serious scientific effort. Mention that your work involves Daphnia pulex (the water flea) or Pimephales promelas (the fathead minnow) and you are bound to get very different reactions to the focus and importance of your work. This goes to show that Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2, may have gotten it all wrong—at least, scientifically—when he wrote:
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose,
By any other name would smell as sweet."
Naming things is central to organizing our daily activities as well as our thoughts—scientific or otherwise. In science this organizing tool is the discipline we call taxonomy (from Greek ταξιυομια [taxinomia]: taxis = order, and nomos = law). This tool is important as it provides us with a standardized mechanism for classifying organisms into recognizable species. Linnaeus, in his 18th century "Systema Naturae" developed the basis for taxonomy as a scheme for categorizing and naming organisms according to their shared characteristics. To date, it is estimated that about 1.7 to 2.0 million species have been categorized taxonomically: that is about 10 percent of the species estimated to inhabit the Earth. Taxonomy's importance to such activities as agriculture and food safety, disease prevention and biodefense, medicine, natural conservation and biodiversity—and much of the research conducted by Office of Research and Development (ORD) scientists—cannot be disputed. Unfortunately, taxonomy is in some quarters—lay and scientific—considered a dusty art, and its value is generally unheralded and undervalued. Nonetheless, a flurry of efforts1 is now underway to bolster the discipline's practice and potential.
Taxonomy's potential has led scientists to look into the opportunity that they may well be able to classify, name and identify organisms using such advanced techniques as molecular systematics—a branch of bioinformatics that employs the genomics-based methods of gene sequencing. With validation of this approach our understanding and naming of organisms would take on an added specificity and precision. Based on the potential for such techniques to revolutionize the practice of taxonomy such initiatives as one known as the Barcode of Life have come to the fore. "Barcoding" life is characterized as a standardized approach to recognizing individual animal, plant and microbial species by identifying a short DNA sequence from a uniform locality on the species' genome. "DNA Barcoding" is seen as a revolutionary addition to the taxonomy armamentarium where rapidly advancing tools of genomics, electronics, and computer science combine.
It is at this disciplinary intersection—where traditional taxonomy is meeting advancing genomic technologies—that the work of Dr. Ann L. Miracle is making a difference. Dr. Miracle is a Research Biologist within the National Exposure Research Laboratory's (NERL) Ecological Exposure Research Division in Cincinnati. She joined the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2001, coming onboard under an appointment to EPA's Federal Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program. As a postdoctoral fellow, she worked on the development of microarray technology (image right) for use in screening exposures to estrogenic substances in those fathead minnows mentioned before. Another goal of this work was the development of reliable and meaningful indicators of exposure to and effect from endocrine disrupting compounds. In 2002, she assumed her current position as a Research Biologist. In the fall of 2004, she became the Scientific Lead for an EPA Computational Toxicology Initiative project entitled Linkage of Exposure and Effects Using Genomics, Proteomics, and Metabonomics in Small Fish Models.
She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Biology at the University of Virginia, and a Master of Science in Molecular Genetics at the University of Florida. Her doctoral studies were in Molecular Immunology at the University of South Florida. Dr. Miracle's professional career in molecular biology began in the late 1980s at the National Institutes of Health where her work focused on the development and validation of human gene therapy methods. Also, before coming to EPA, she conducted research at Georgetown University, at the Universities of Florida and South Florida, and with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. Most of her graduate research has involved aquatic and marine organisms and the study of their genetics. In line with one of the model organisms that she investigates, Dr. Miracle is a member of the Daphnia Genomics Consortium (DGC). The DGC is an international network of investigators committed to conducting research on the freshwater crustacean Daphnia (that water flea mentioned before) to verify its utility as a model system for the study of evolutionary and ecological genetics, and the study of genomics. In January 2005, the Natural Environment Research Council (U.K.) announced a three year award of about $600,000 to fund a DGC project on "Linking genomes to ecology: Molecular evolution of the immune-related genome of Daphnia pulex." The research is designed to apply emerging genetic knowledge to the study of parasitic interactions. In particular the research will exploit the newly sequenced water flea genome to obtain a link between patterns of parasitism and the genes involved in resistance.
Overall, NERL conducts studies that are designed to improve methods, measurements and models that can be applied to the comprehensive assessment and prediction of exposures of humans and ecosystems to harmful substances and other stressors that may occur in air, water, soil, and food. The focus of Dr. Miracle's work, within NERL's Molecular Indicators Research Branch is the development and validation of diagnostic indicators of exposure—at the molecular level—to endocrine disrupting compounds, pesticides and other agents that are foreign to biological systems. This research on indicators spans multiple levels of biological organization from the subcellular (for example, tissue concentrations of biochemicals) to the application of impacts at the individual and population levels. Her investigations of molecular indicator methods include gene expression systems for studying exposure to high priority chemical contaminants, molecular methods for assessing exposure to genotoxic agents, and integration of various molecular measures with whole organism effects in a systems biology context. Significantly, her research focuses not only on the development of innovative indicators using laboratory methods—she also evaluates these methods in the field to establish reference levels and to investigate uncertainties with their application.
To give some context, the Environmental Protection Agency defines the term "indicator" in several ways. Indicators are science-based measurements that track environmental or health conditions over time; they help measure the state of our health, air, water and land resources, the pressures on them, and the resulting effects on ecological and human health; and they show progress in making us healthier, the air cleaner, the water purer, and in protecting our land. Dr. Miracle's research, therefore, has implications not only for such approaches as species "barcoding" efforts but also for clarifying—through the use of microarrays or "gene Chips"—how the consequences of chemical exposure can be discerned at progressively finer levels of biological organization.
Miracle believes that her early motivation for choosing a science career came from her passion for reading. She says she eagerly dispatched countless issues of such magazines as National Geographic; and she was, and remains, fascinated by natural history and at one point considered becoming a veterinarian. From her readings she gathered particular inspiration from such natural historians as Jane Goodall. She saw Goodall as an exemplary and courageously independent woman at the forefront of her scientific discipline. If she could, Dr. Miracle indicates that she would like to have time to meet and have dinner with Goodall.
While most of her early interest in science and in a scientific career has been self-generated, in graduate school she credits Dr. Gary Litman with allowing her to develop into an independent researcher while working under his guidance. The best piece of advice she has received came from Dr. Richard Morgan, her supervisor at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, NIH, who told her "to try to learn something new everywhere she decided to go or work." Dr. Miracle has seemingly taken that advice to heart as her research career has allowed her to work on problems that range from human gene therapy to acquired immune deficiency syndrome to genomics. She is an avid scuba diver but sees less and less chance to follow that avocation as a full-time mother and scientist. Given her interest in diving, when asked where most she would like to work, she says, "doing marine research, in the Caribbean." Currently, she has taken up running as an ideal way to relieve common stress.
Although she had worked in government, Dr. Miracle came to work at NERL due to what she saw as great opportunity in the EPA's Federal Postdoctoral Research Program. Now, she says that—being an organized person—she gets greatest job satisfaction from being able to complete assignments. One book that has fascinated her due to its treatment of science is Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton: she was intrigued by the ways that the author presented and handled conflicting interests of science and ethical responsibility. Of the one thing about science that she wishes the public understood better, she expresses the hope that the public can come to recognize that science-based information is neither black nor white. She hopes that more and more people who are increasingly depending on science can see that it is an error-correcting process whose greatest advantage is its advancement.
The Office of Research and Development is committed to showing the difference the important work its scientists and engineers is making in peoples lives. We welcome your reaction to-and any comments on-this "Spotlight" feature article; please send them to draggan.sidney@epa.gov.
1 All Species Foundation; Species 2000's Catalogue of Life Programme; Integrated Taxonomic Information System. Back