The Germ of an Idea

The interdisciplinary thinking the BYU Honors Program strives to cultivate in its students and faculty is exemplified in our HONRS 200 level classes - the Unexpected Connections courses. Classes are team-taught by professors from two different disciplines who choose their section’s unique focus and curriculum. Students are able to engage in an exceptional interdisciplinary learning environment and make unexpected connections of their own during the course.

One of our Honors Unexpected Courses this Fall Semester, team-taught by Dr. Dennis Cutchins and Dr. Brian Poole, is titled “The Germ of an Idea: Disease and Literature.” The course is based upon the idea that disease has molded human behavior as well as human culture, and combines the GE Biology & Letters courses.

“The basic gist of the class is recognizing that disease has had a surprising and long term and endemic effect on culture and literature. It is surprising to see how some of the best Operas, like La Boheme or La Traviata were written about disease. Or that some of the best poets like Keats or Shelley were inspired by disease. We even talk about how our notions of what’s beautiful or what our definition of horror is, like Poe, are often influenced by disease,” said Dr. Cutchins, Associate Director of the Honors Program.

When talking about the class, Dr. Poole said, “I think that’s a huge part of it, disease’s effect on culture. We also talk about a couple of times when disease almost wipes out cultures with the Native Americans and the Black Plague, it has these radical effects on culture, art and literature. We spend the second part of the class talking about disease and humanity, and the ‘other’, how you define yourself and other people. We read these really awesome zombie books that address that question really well. If you have a disease, are you considered subhuman?”

The class headed to the Life Science Building on a Friday morning to participate in a lab experiment: gram staining bacteria. Students tested whether their bacteria was gram positive or negative, and how the results of their experiment can lead to information on what antibiotics would be needed to treat the bacteria.

All of the bacteria was grown by Dr. Poole, and students took photos of their final products.

Rio Turnbull, a senior in the English program noted, “Biology has always been my least favorite subject in school, and so I always knew that doing the biology GE requirement at BYU wouldn’t be so great… it would be difficult and I wouldn’t be very good at it. But that’s part of the reason I knew the Honors courses would be enjoyable to me because I knew it would make it a little more palatable even though the Biology aspects are slightly difficult and less appealing to me. It’s tempered really well with how broad their objectives are and also the different topics we explore. It makes Biology seem more relevant to me.”

Drs. Cutchins and Poole also see the influence of their topic in pop culture and its importance in current events.

“We’ve talked about the tuberculosis quarantine situations in Russia. They’ve been in there so long, and they will never get out… Can you really make a difference between being in prison versus being in quarantine for the rest of your life? The reason that this is happening to them isn’t that they were bad or breaking the law, it’s because they got a disease. We think zombie literature and movies have been so popular over the past twenty years due to people’s concerns about healthcare. It’s not surprising that in the time the zombie movies have been rising, there have been increasing fears and increasing realities of pandemics, and that in most of the zombie movies or narratives, disease plays a huge role,” said Dr. Cutchins.

Dr. Poole asked, “With all these movies you are destroying these zombies and you’ve got the wall and everything, but what if they aren’t really just zombies and they are just sick people? What are you doing? What message are you sending?”

Johnny Bigelow, a senior in Strategic Management said, “I love the opportunity I have to think in ways I’ve never considered before. I take honors classes because the content, comments and assignments usually let me grow in ways I’ve never tried.”

One of the most important aspects of the Unexpected Connections courses is the focus on developing critical thinking skills as well as honing student’s problem solving abilities in an interdisciplinary way. Drs. Cutchins and Poole accomplish this through one of their midterms.

“We give three tests in the class, and the second test is a problem solving test. We come up with a situation, bring it to class, and the class has to solve it with the principles that they’ve learned. The first [semester we taught this course] we were trying to solve a small-pox outbreak among the American Indians in the 1830’s,” Dr. Poole said. “For the second class we hypothesized a killer influenza outbreak at BYU, and how every aspect of the people here: the administration, and the police, the health services, would have to deal with that. [Students had to examine] how it would affect the people here, and how they would have to respond.”

Dr. Cutchins added, “We’ll have another problem for the students to solve this semester, and we are excited to come up with it.”

This course is a result of successful collaboration between Drs. Cutchins and Poole, and has been an Honors student favorite over the past three years. “They are quite the dynamic duo- it makes class engaging and I highly recommend it,” added Rio Turnbull.