Moments in Medicine at Michigan

Ezra Lowe, from Brooklyn, New York, is in his fifth year of working on a Ph.D. in pharmacology

Ezra Lowe with West Middle School Students Rabia Haji-Hassan, Indrea Joplin and Ryan Gore. Photo: J. Adrian Wylie

“Pharmacology rocks! It incorporates so many fields — chemistry, molecular biology, physiology. What do drugs do to the body? What does the body do to drugs? Those are the questions that drive the work. You start with a simple idea and then it jumps from a cell to an animal to a human being. Right now I’m working on an enzyme, nitric oxide synthase, seeing how tobacco inhibits it. I love the reality of laboratory discoveries, the doing, the seeing with your own eyes.

“We have a program, Science Unlimited, where we go into the Ypsilanti Public Schools. We go to middle schools with predominantly minority kids and explain simple science concepts, like how bacteria grow. We’ll let the kids run rampant and swab different areas of the school — the floors, the bathrooms, even their mouths. Then we put the swabs on culture plates and come back a week later. When they see the bacteria growing on the plates, there’s actually joy on their faces! There was a question and now there’s an answer. It’s that reality thing. The doing, the seeing with your own eyes. Even kids who’ve never really experienced science before get it.”