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A Field Laboratory<br />
on Campus<br />
No, It’s Not Iowa. Welcome to the <strong>Lehman</strong> Cornfield.<br />
It’s been eight years since the first crop of corn was planted on a 5,000 square-foot<br />
plot of land in the northeast section of the <strong>Lehman</strong> campus. During the summer<br />
months when the corn is at its peak, the field is busy with undergraduate and graduate<br />
students, postdoctoral scientists, and other visiting scholars, preparing the<br />
plants for pollination and collecting materials. Sometimes even local high school<br />
students, enrolled in <strong>Lehman</strong>’s “<strong>College</strong> Now” Program, are invited to join in and<br />
learn about the research taking place there. The cornfield is the field-laboratory<br />
part of a sophisticated research laboratory where Dr. Eleanore Wurtzel (Biological<br />
Sciences) and her team of researchers are working to find ways to solve the global<br />
health problem of vitamin A deficiency. Their goal is to produce the knowledge and<br />
tools needed to make corn more nutritious in its vitamin A and beta-carotene content<br />
and to discover methods for improving plant yield. The <strong>Lehman</strong> field is believed<br />
to be the only research cornfield in New York City.<br />
Photos by Joshua Bright.<br />
High school student Harry<br />
Chen examines the Arabidopsis<br />
thaliana model plant,<br />
often used in plant biology<br />
and genetics.<br />
Dr. Wurtzel with Jesús Beltrán, a CUNY<br />
Plant Sciences Ph.D. student.<br />
40 <strong>Lehman</strong> Today/<strong>Spring</strong> <strong>2011</strong><br />
Dr. Louis Bradbury, a post-doctoral<br />
student from Australia, holds a petri<br />
dish containing bacteria. A colony of<br />
cells is growing in a clump, genetically<br />
engineered with a plant gene.<br />
Dr. Wurtzel explains the different parts of the<br />
corn to high school student Natasha Kodua.