Whether Mary Schweitzer is peer ing into a microscope in the lab or speaking in front of a class of gradu ate students, this N.C. State profes sor of marine earth and atmospheric sciences is continually contributing to the University and her field.

Schweitzer made a discovery that turned the field of paleontology upside down when she found soft tissue inside a Tyrannosaurus rex bone. There is no doubt Schweitzer has made a huge mark on the world of science, but what many people likely don’t know is how many fun ny mistakes she has made or how open she is about them.

“I study a lot of different aspects of dinosaur biology, but I’m pretty much interested in how they func tioned in their world,” Schweitzer said. “I look at how they are pre served and their transition from the biosphere to living on the geo sphere. It’s kind of well-known on some levels, but at that really tiny molecular level, we don’t really un derstand how something becomes a fossil – and so that’s really interest ing to me.”

To study the material that Sch weitzer does, she said she spends many hours in the lab each week. She teaches a three-hour graduate course one day per week and said she is in the lab most other days.

“In the lab, we take the minerals out of bone, both modern and fossil bones because bone is a composite tissue of both organic and mineral materials,” Schweitzer said.

She said if you take away the min eral in a living person, they can get diseases, such as rickets, because the collagen is not rigid enough to support the weight, and if you take away the protein, they can get brittle bone disease.

“So you need both, and, like in a fossil from a dinosaur, it was always assumed that the organic compo nents rot away and so purely by ac cident we discovered that probably is not the case,” Schweitzer said. “So now we are looking at exactly what is preserved in the dinosaur bone and exactly how it might be preserved, and from those things I hope that we can expand to other considerations like human diseases, evolutionary relationship or the speed of molecu lar evolution.”

Though this science-talk sounds serious and solemn, Schweitzer’s stories about some mistakes she has made were anything but.

“Way back in graduate school I was learning my methods, and technology has changed a lot since then, but we used to have to pour our own protein gels,” Schweitzer said, “which is kind of a complicated process, or at least it was back then.”

According to Schweitzer, in or der to make protein gel, she had to mix chemicals and other ingre dients together to make a solution that looked like Jell-O. Then, she poured the substance into a really thin space between two glass plates. After that, she added a polymeriz ing agent. She said when proteins are loaded on the gel, and an electric current runs through it, the proteins move at different rates depending on size. To determine all of the size fragments requires a high electrical current going through the fluid box.

“Well, I didn’t get everything screwed down tightly enough, and so it ran out of fluid, so we had this really high electrical current that melted the gel and the gel rig and almost started the lab on fire,” Sch weitzer said. “So that was interesting – my supervisor at the time didn’t like me very much.”

After that story was told, Sch weitzer excitedly said, “I got an other one.” The experiment she was doing was to see if an eggshell would change based on whether or not the animal inside it was rotted or whether the eggshell was broken.

“So I had chicken eggs that still had the embryos in them, so I let it rot in the lab for probably three months. So I picked up the eggshell and it was real white so I thought ev erything was gone,” Schweitzer said. “I thought everything was dried up so I took a teeny tiny needle because I wanted to save almost all of the eggshell and as soon as I punctured the shell, it exploded.”

She continued her story by pro viding some imagery for peak story telling.

“I had all of this rotten egg-goo all over my hair, running down my face and it sounded like a gunshot,” Schweitzer said. “The gases were all mixed up and it was under a lot of pressure so as soon as I hit that needle through, it just exploded, it was so gross.”

Schweitzer then related her most embarrassing story, one that in volved a long fall. She explained that she joined a friend of hers to lead some high school teachers in a ‘pay to dig’ dinosaur bones type activity for her friend’s thesis work.

She went on to say that it had rained the previous night in the area they were digging and explained that when the soils get wet, they stick to the bottom of your shoes so you are walking around on about a foot of clay.

“So we decided that we should have just not gone, but the teachers were there and they gave money and we wanted to lead them,” Schweitzer said. “So again, I am kind of spacey so I wasn’t looking where I was going and I was leading a group of teach ers and I slipped and went face first down this slope at a very steep angle: I mean it was a long fall.”

According to Schweitzer, it was very embarrassing and she was covered in mud. As she went on to conclude her stories, she thought of yet another instance of embarrass ment that was almost dire.

“So in both the field and the lab I have had, well actually I have almost killed myself in the field — getting stuck in quicksand, again in front of a whole bunch of people,” Sch weitzer said. “They were laughing quite hard at me, so yeah, that was interesting.”

According to Schweitzer, she doesn’t take herself too seriously because when you do, it’s easy to make mistakes.

“If you take yourself too seri ously, then it’s a disaster, but it’s also not like Indiana Jones either,” Schweitzer said. “You end up eating dirt in your sandwiches or sitting on snakes in the outhouse, which I have also done. Now that was really embarrassing but it’s a lot of fun.”

She said mistakes are healthy, es pecially in the field of science.

“You learn more from a mistake or an experiment that doesn’t turn out then you ever do when it goes the way it was predicted,” Schweitzer said. “In fact, a lot of major scien tific discoveries have come about as a result of things going wrong, like penicillin for example.”

According to Schweitzer, the most important thing she has learned was not formulated in a lab.

“There isn’t a single outcome of any science more important than human relationships,” Scheitzer said. “I would never risk a paper or a discovery at the expense of a rela tionship,” Schweitzer said. “You’re never going to end up on your deathbed wishing you would have spent another day in the lab, now spending one more day with your kids—20that’s important.”