Diary: My First Day at a University in Berlin

THIS AUTUMN I'm beginning to study at the Freie Universität here in Berlin, and yesterday I went to the very first course, which is a two-day "Brückenkurs" or "bridging course" for first-year biology students. Biology is not my major or even my minor; but it interests me and it was the scientific field I took in high school after Grade 10, and participation in the course was not recorded so there were no administrative obstacles.

I found out the date, time and place from the university's Vorlesungsverzeichnis (course index) online, and looked up the route on the website of the BVG, Berlin's city transit authority.

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THE MAIN FU campus is in Dahlem, a quiet neighbourhood around a former royal farm in southwestern Berlin.
A couple of the university buildings are worldlier and larger and formal — often quite zeitgeisty of the 60s when the modern university was founded — while many are quite domestic little buildings surrounded by lawns and hedges and by homes.

Illustration: Königin-Luise-Straße 12-16 (Built 1966-70), Institut für Pflanzenbiologie und Mikrobiologie
Photographed by Axel Mauruszat
(Licenced under CC-BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Königin-Luise-Straße is a thoroughfare and the boxy white biology building where the course ran is at 12-16; it looks sixtiesish and kind of minimalist in a utilitarian way, and feels bigger inside than it does from the street, and it was built by Wassili Luckhardt. The course took place in the Großer Hörsaal.

The Brückenkurs is intended to introduce students to their field and to the university in general, and to show them which prior knowledge is needed for their biology courses. So the first two speakers covered the introduction.

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THEN one of the senior professors gave a lecture on the history of the microscope with the assistance of a PowerPoint slideshow and an old-timey instructional film on the electron microscope from 1992.

It was fascinating. I liked the opening thought that before the development of the light microscope, one did not really think that there would be much to see on the smaller scale.

We began with the chequered lives of Zacharias Janssen and of his father Hans Martens and moved on to Antony van Leeuwenhoek, whose name was familiar from school.

Van Leeuwenhoek was a cloth tradesman and so his scientific pursuits were a "dilettantic" hobby. But he invented a magnifying mechanism and then used it to discover and observe all sorts of unknown organisms, which he described in letters sent to the Royal Society in London in his native Dutch; later these letters were translated into academic Latin and published in book form.

Surprisingly the Leeuwenhoek microscope was not a lensed barrel, but rather a mirror-form object: a metal plate with a tiny lens in it, then a long stick for a handle which is clamped on to the plate. You place the specimen on the tip and hold the microscope upright to the eye to see it through the lens.

Illustration: Van Leeuwenhoek microscope, Boerhaave Museum

Robert Hooke's microscope looks more familiar; besides he recognized that all plants and animals are composed of cells. The term "cell" mostly referred to rooms in a monastery or jail, so he used it hesitantly and offered "box" and "pore" as alternatives. He was not an outsider as van Leeuwenhoek mostly was, but in fact a member of the Royal Society.

AFTER facilitating countless discoveries in medicine and other disciplines, the development of the light microscope topped out and endeavouring to magnify anything above 1000 x was fairly pointless. So eventually, in the 20th century, an electron microscope (≠ electronic light microscope) was invented to cover the light wavelengths which are not visible to the human eye. The physics are beyond me, but the shorter wavelengths of the electrons pick up tinier details, and the electrons are channeled through the microscope and focused with the aid of a magnet. The electron microscope's limitation is for example that it cannot be used on living specimens, since they are examined in a vacuum. There are two types of electron microscope; one is used to trans-illumine specimens, and it showed us the organelles (Golgi apparatus, mitochondria, etc.) inside plant and animal cells which are now familiar from any high school microbiology unit, and another scans the surface of specimens to create a three-dimensional picture.

A Berliner born in Heidelberg, Ernst Ruska, laid out the fundamental principles of the electron microscope at the very young age of 24. Disinterest and World War II interrupted the microscope's development and it only caught on once the war had ended. In 1986 he won the Nobel Prize alongside Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer; two years afterward he died.

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FOUR or five doctorate students presented PowerPoint slideshows on the work they are doing in the realm of plant and insect physiology. It was quite interesting stuff about scents that attract predators of herbivorous insects or warn neighbouring plants, enzymes that inhibit the digestive systems of herbivorous insects, and in general the natural defense/offense mechanisms of plants like coyote tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata) and of insects.

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I went home during the break, very content with the first day from the studious perspective. I not only learned enough, but also feel too old and cynical for the freshman cheerleading moments (given that I already attended UBC for two years, five years ago); so I've skipped the second day and am enjoying a relaxed weekend before the proper courses begin on Monday.