As a child visiting her grandparents in Turkey, Gül Dölen was terrified to swim in the Mediterranean. She could see through the clear water all the way to the bottom, where scores of sea urchins lived. “I was like, ‘I'm not gonna go in that water; those spiky things are gonna hurt me,’” she recalls. Her grandmother, a zoologist and high school biology teacher, knew how to transform Dölen’s fear: She plucked one of the spiny echinoderms out of the water and dissected it right there on the beach. She showed her 8-year-old granddaughter its mouth, its little teeth, its stomach.
“I wasn’t scared anymore,” Dölen says. “I was just curious.”
Dölen’s office decor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is associate professor of neuroscience, recalls that teachable moment. Sea urchin skeletons line the long windowsill, alongside snail shells and an ammonite fossil—even a preserved octopus. But ...
