The CIRM booth at Discovery Day at AT&T Park

Someone stole my thigh bone. One minute it was there. The next, gone. I have narrowed down the list of suspects to the more than 25,000 people attending Discovery Day at San Francisco’s AT&T Park.

To be honest, the bone was just a laminated image of a bone, stuck to the image of a person drawn on a white board. We were using it, along with laminated images of a brain, liver, stomach and other organs and tissues, to show that there are many different kinds of stem cells in the body, and they all have different potential uses.

The white board and its body parts were gimmicks that we used to get kids to come up to the CIRM booth and ask what we were doing. Then, as they played with the images, and tried to guess which stem cells went where, we talked to their parents about stem cell research, and CIRM and the progress being made.

Dr. Karen Ring explaining embryonic development to kids

We also used Play Doh so that the kids could model cell division and specialization during embryonic development. But mostly it was so the kids could play with the Play Doh while we talked to their parents.

It is shameless I know but when you are competing against more than 130 other booths for people’s attention – and some of these booths had live snakes, virtual reality devices, or they just let kids throw and hit things – you have to be creative.

And creativity was certainly the key word, because Discovery Day – part of the annual week-long Bay Area Science Fair – was filled with booths from companies and academic institutions promoting every imaginable aspect of science.

So why were we there? Well, first, education has been an important part of CIRM’s mission ever since we were created. Second, we’re a state agency that gets public funding so we feel we owe it to the public to explain how their money is being used. And third, it’s just a lot of fun.

NASA was there, talking about exploring deep space. And there were booths focused on exploring the oceans, and saving them from pollution and over-fishing. You could learn about mathematics and engineering by building wacky-looking paper airplanes that flew long distances, or you could just sit in the cockpit of a fighter jet.

And everywhere you looked were families, with kids running up to the different booths to see what was there. All they needed was a little draw to get them to stick around for a few minutes, so you could talk to them and explain to them what stem cells are and why they are so amazing. Some of the kids were fascinated and wanted to know more: some just wanted to use the Play Doh;  at least one just wanted to eat the Play Doh, but fortunately we were able to stop that happening.

It was an amazing sight to see a baseball stadium filled with tens of thousands of people, all there to learn about science. At a time when we are told that kids don’t care about science, that they don’t like math, this was the perfect response. All you had to do was look around and see that kids were fascinated by science. They were hungry to learn how pouring carbon dioxide on a candle puts out the flame. They delighted in touching an otter pelt and feeling how silky smooth it is, and then looking at the pelt under a microscope to see just how extraordinarily dense the hairs are and how that helps waterproof the otter.

And so yes, we used Play Doh and a white board person to lure the kids to us. But it worked.

There was another booth where they had a couple of the San Francisco 49er’s cheerleaders in full uniform. I don’t actually know what that had to do with teaching science but it was very popular with some of the men. Maybe next year I could try dressing up like that. It would certainly draw a crowd.

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