When Ronald Hoy, the Cornell University recipient of a $1 million Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant, promises to "bring the fruits of research to the classroom and lab," he doesn't mean overripe bananas. Instead, the fruit fly Drosophila will make the short trip across campus, and Hoy, the Merksamer Professor in Biology in Cornell's neurobiology and behavior department, expects that favorite organism of genetics researchers will have a lot to teach college students, both in Ithaca and nationwide.

The grants of $250,000 a year for four years challenge tenured and accomplished science professors at research universities to show the same ingenuity in undergraduate teaching that they have demonstrated in their scientific research.

Says Hoy, one of 20 winners announced today (Sept. 18) of Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Professor awards, "I would not be surprised, what with all the additional eyes and ears focused on the behavior and neurology of Drosophila, if some of these student-scientists make new discoveries about fly behavior that have eluded the professionals."

"Teaching of undergraduates tends to be undervalued at research universities," said Peter J. Bruns, vice president for grants and special programs at HHMI. "By rewarding great teaching and supporting a synergistic interaction between research and undergraduate education, we hope to sow seeds of a fundamental change in the culture of research universities. We want the HHMI professors to demonstrate that active, productive scientists can be effective teachers, too." Bruns, a professor of genetics at Cornell before joining the HHMI administration, taught undergraduates throughout his research career.

As well as being a researcher in the bioacoustics and neuroethology of insects, Hoy also is the developer of innovative teaching tools, including Project Crawdad, which teaches the principles of nervous system electrophysiology in all animals by using the common crayfish as a model. This encouraged him to attempt two even more ambitious teaching programs, Project Fruit Fly and Biomimetics: Mother Nature Wears Engineering Boots, which will be developed under the auspices of the HHMI program.As with "Crawdad," the final product of these new programs will be a DVD or CD-ROM depicting laboratory experiments taken from the forefront of research, then developed and tested with help from college students and instructors. "Fruit Fly" will teach what Hoy calls the genetic dissection of behavior by guiding students through a series of classic experiments in the analysis of neural systems and the behaviors they generate through the use of DNA mutations of Drosophila that target specific behaviors. Working with fruit flies, students will discover why Drosophila is such a useful model for behavior in other kinds of animals: Its brain engages some of the same molecules, such as serotonin and dopamine, that affect aggression and social behavior in more complex animals, for example.

Project Crawdad, which was developed and tested with a grant from the National Science Foundation and is nationally distributed by Sinauer Associates, was the work of Hoy and senior research associates Robert A. Wyttenbach and Bruce R. Johnson. Hoy hopes to engage the same researchers' talents, as well as those of other colleagues, to work on the fruit fly and biomimetics teaching tools.

Biomimetics, Hoy explains, is a technological strategy in which engineers investigate biological systems to see how they "solve" interesting problems through clever adaptations that have been shaped by evolutionary forces and then apply those insights to products for human activities. He points to just two examples:

• Plants with burrs developed small hook-covered seed pods to disseminate their genes on the loopy fur of animals long before humans copied the hook-and-loop design for the reusable fastener, Velcro.
• Molecular biologists can "troll" for key genes among the many in an organism's genome using the polymerase chain reaction because Mother Nature put the enzyme in certain hot springs bacteria.

A Cornell faculty member since 1974, Hoy says that the university is a perfect place for one of the inaugural grants in the Hughes Institute's new program. "Cornell University has a very long tradition of expecting its senior professors to honor both sides of the professional contact -- to conduct research and teach at the undergraduate level," says Hoy. "The Hughes grant is the kind of support we need to create more incubators for new ideas about teaching the biomedical sciences."