Wightman, who studies a microscopic worm that allows scientists to understand a great deal about humans, has mentored hundreds of student researchers during his decades at Muhlenberg.
It’s easy to find Professor and Chair of Biology Bruce Wightman’s office. His photo is on the door. Well, it’s a photo of only his face from at least a decade ago that students in his lab cut out and affixed to a five-foot-long worm body made of white printer paper. It’s Wightman as a Caenorhabditis elegans, the model organism Wightman has studied since he was in graduate school at Harvard University.
“If you go into my lab, you’ll see it’s just covered with student antics — all kinds of little creative things that students have done,” says Wightman, who arrived at Muhlenberg in 1996. “It’s them getting into the milieu of being a scientist and seeing the things about it that are funny.”
Wightman was also introduced to research as an undergraduate at a liberal arts college (Oberlin College) when he spent a summer studying ecology with a professor at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
“I started to see that people did science as a living, which had never really occurred to me before. I thought of my college professors as teachers, like many students do. It took me a couple years before I figured out that these people are scholars.”
“That moment was really transitional for me,” he says. “I started to see that people did science as a living, which had never really occurred to me before. I thought of my college professors as teachers, like many students do. It took me a couple years before I figured out that these people are scholars.”
After graduating, he spent a couple years working in a biomedical research lab at Case Western Reserve University before applying to grad school. He landed in a genetics program at Harvard Medical School in a lab that was among the first to use C. elegans as a model organism to understand biological mechanisms in all animals. His advisor was Gary Ruvkun, a professor of genetics and co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2024. A 1993 paper Wightman co-authored was cited as a key publication in the awarding of that prize. He learned of the news when a former student texted to congratulate him.
“Gary and Victor [Ambros] had won every other award for this discovery of the miRNA (microRNA) regulatory mechanism … and it seemed like at this point, it was going to be neglected by the Nobel,” says Wightman. His paper helped establish the mechanism in C. elegans, but it took several more years for scientists to show that the mechanism was universal across all animals, including humans. It became “essentially a new piece of what we call the central dogma of molecular biology, which is our way of thinking about DNA, RNA, protein. By 2000, the case was made. And that’s 25 years ago now. It took [the Nobel] a long time to catch up.”
Wightman teaching in fall 2024
After Harvard, Wightman spent four years as a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, which is where he began using C. elegans to study the mechanics of neuronal development — how genes regulate the differentiation of the many, many different types of neurons that exist in an organism. That’s still broadly what students in his lab at Muhlenberg are studying 30 years later.
Many of Wightman’s research students are pre-med science majors, although one or two each year will discover they love research so much that they want to pursue a doctorate. He has 12 students in his lab this semester — much bigger than the average lab — but he says, “I have allowed my lab to get big because I like my students. They’re fun. And at this point in my career, why not?”
“I have allowed my lab to get big because I like my students. They’re fun. And at this point in my career, why not?”
Wightman teaches a range of classes, from the introductory course in cell and molecular biology to a senior seminar on the molecular biology of cancer. But Genetics is his favorite course to teach because the nature of the discipline is about learning patterns and approaches and beginning to think experimentally. It’s the side of science — the concepts rather than the content — that he fell in love with as an undergraduate conducting research more than 40 years ago, and it’s what set him on the career path he has followed since.
“I realized that science was a way to try to find truth, and the journey was what was interesting — getting there is the cool part, not the answers,” he says. “I still to this day have that conversation with my students when they’re thinking about, ‘Do I want to go into science?’ The question is never about what you want to accomplish. The question is, ‘Do you like doing this? Do you like failure? Do you like asking questions and doing experiments in the lab?’ Because if you’re motivated by success, you’re going to be really disappointed. It’s a journey, a very imprecise journey.”
“I still to this day have that conversation with my students when they’re thinking about, ‘Do I want to go into science?’ The question is never about what you want to accomplish. The question is, ‘Do you like doing this? Do you like failure? Do you like asking questions and doing experiments in the lab?’ Because if you’re motivated by success, you’re going to be really disappointed. It’s a journey, a very imprecise journey.”
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