By AMY ADAMS

Daniel Ginsburg would have you know that as a genetics graduate student he has no interest in creating mutant monsters, cloning himself or minting deadly pathogens, no matter how sensationally movies portray the average geneticist. He and other Stanford students and faculty in the Department of Genetics want simply to understand how genes function.

This is one message they hope to convey through a collaboration with the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation. Other messages -- that science is fun and interesting, that genetics is central to human disease and that anybody can become a scientist -- are all woven into exhibits as eye-catching as they are kid-friendly.

Richard Myers, PhD, professor of genetics and chair of the department, said that when the museum approached him, he jumped at the chance to collaborate. He has a long-standing interest in educating the public about science in general and genetics in particular. "Scientists owe it to people to explain what they do, particularly when they deal with human health," Myers said.

A double helix of cookbooks creates a metaphor for the recipe of life at a genetics exhibition jointly conceived by San Jose's Tech Museum and Stanford gene researchers and students. Photo: courtesy of Barry Starr

As a geneticist Myers feels especially compelled to do outreach because the topic is often oversimplified. "Most of the ways that genes work are much more complex than people realize, partly because scientists themselves have often oversimplified things. For example, the public is led to think there will be one gene for one behavior or a complex disease. Some behaviors we can't even define, much less find the genes for."

Myers and Michael Cherry, PhD, associate professor of genetics, got a government grant with the Tech Museum to help fund its new DNA exhibit and to hire Barry Starr, PhD, to act as an interface between the museum and Stanford scientists. In addition, the department provides ongoing advice and sends graduate students such as Ginsburg to work at the exhibit for two-quarter rotations.

Myers said the new exhibit came about as a collaboration, with genetics faculty and students suggesting themes or ideas and the Tech Museum staff devising creative ways of conveying those ideas.

"We would be giving ideas and next time we met they would have integrated those along with input from other people," Cherry said. He noted the hard part was making those ideas work in a museum format. "It's tough trying to come up with something that the kids would be able to do and get what they are doing."

Myers said the final exhibit is both accurate and interesting. "These guys really know what they're doing in conveying information to the public," he said. In addition to getting ideas across there's the problem of attention span. Young kids visiting the museum have to stay interested long enough to learn something.

The exhibit is designed to woo tech-savvy youngsters with hands-on demonstrations, computer simulations and an ongoing Web relationship. Visitors all get an ID bracelet that they can scan into exhibits to receive collectible cards as a prize for interacting with different parts of the exhibit. In one activity, visitors record themselves reading a health-policy speech. Later they can go online to watch their computerized image deliver that speech to Congress.

Genetics graduate student Joylette Portlock (left) is on duty at the tech museum, explaining to kids the ins and outs of genome research. Photo courtesy of Barry Starr

"There's a lot of things where they are trying to make it more interactive using the Web," Cherry said. With their ID tags, students can log on to their personalized page from home and get updates on exhibits or even see results from experiments they started while at the museum.

In one such experiment, the kids put a piece of jellyfish DNA into bacteria, then grow those bacteria on lab dishes. The inserted DNA makes a glowing protein that the kids can see online. When they check their Web page the following day, they see a photograph of their bacterial dish -- if it has glowing bacteria colonies the experiment worked.

Other parts of the exhibit explain basic genetics such as how people inherit eye color or hair color through genes. But the exhibit also conveys the kind of day-to-day work geneticists do. The visitors learn about technology, genetic screening and some of the ethical issues being raised by genetic knowledge. They can even extract and look at actual cow DNA.

These hands-on experiments raised questions about what takes place in a genetics lab. "Sometimes people asked if this is really what we do and if this is really the equipment we use," said Joylette Portlock, a genetics graduate student who works on the exhibit. "I kept saying 'yeah, this is really what we use' and they almost couldn't believe it."

"They all wanted to know what we would do next in a real experiment," said fellow graduate student and docent Chana Palmer.

Although they agreed that not all the visitors understood the experiments, some did. And some of those seemed amazed that they could do "real" science. "I feel like we are helping to demystify genetics," Portlock said.

The graduate students agreed that genetics has an unearned mystique, in part because of the way movies and books portray geneticists. "They are always shown trying to do something negative," Ginsburg said.

In "Gattaca" genetics is a discriminatory tool. In "Jurassic Park" geneticists recreate ultimately lethal dinosaurs. In "Spider-Man," a genetically altered spider transforms a high school student into a superhero after an accidental bite.

With any luck, kids passing through the Tech Museum of Innovation exhibit will know better than to trust those portrayals. And just maybe they'll be inspired by the promise of genetics research.