The gales of laughter ringing through the trees can mean only one thing -- somebody has taken a spill off a mountain bike and headed down the muddy hillside.
Though they look like a bunch of kids hooking school on a pleasant spring day, these dozen or so bikers are actually some of the brightest young scientific minds in the state.
Presiding over them is Michael Summers, a youthful-looking 41-year-old AIDS researcher at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. A couple of times a week, he and many of his students don helmets and head to nearby Patapsco Valley State Park.
The steep inclines and rocky trails might provide respite from the tedious work of bombarding molecules with radio waves and analyzing computer printouts, but the cycling also offers the type of challenge Summers wants his students to take on.
Just as these undergraduates never rode a mountain bike before Summers got them on the trails, so they never tried top-level scientific research until they came into his laboratory.
Now they can pedal up clifflike hills and splash through rocky streams with aplomb. And barely out of their teens, they have produced discoveries and research papers that would make veteran scientists proud.
"One thing I learned from my parents was to set your sights high," says Summers. "It's better to do that and fail than to set them low and succeed."
So he doesn't take his students for an easy pedal down a dirt road. And he gives freshmen who come into his lab problems that have stumped postdoctoral fellows.
But even as Summers has guided these students into the higher realms of research, the students have taken this soft-spoken Florida native down paths he never thought he would follow.
Nine seniors who have worked in his lab are graduating Tuesday. "What they have done is remarkable," says Summers. "I don't know if I'll ever see a group like them again."
Seven of the seniors are African-Americans, attracted to UMBC by its Meyerhoff scholars program, designed by school President Freeman A. Hrabowski III to bring more minorities to the sciences.
"I always saw UMBC as a steppingstone," says Summers, who came to the campus 12 years ago mainly because his wife had established a dental practice nearby. "I never thought I would be involved in a social movement like this."
And he never thought he would meet identical twins like Brian and Ryan Turner. Natives of Nanticoke on the Eastern Shore, the Turners are products of James M. Bennett High School in Salisbury, where they were the only blacks in their classes and co-valedictorians at their graduation.
Both have published extensively under Summers' tutelage. Brian had a cover article this year in Journal of Molecular Biology. Ryan is the valedictorian at UMBC's commencement, the first Meyerhoff scholar so honored.
They have identical transcripts at UMBC. "Except for that one 'B' in biochemistry," Brian says, and they break up in laughter remembering a tough test on enzymes.
No language barrier
Ryan was one of about 20 UMBC seniors with perfect 4.0 averages. A faculty committee interviewed them to pick the valedictorian. One of the committee members asked Ryan about a summer he spent doing research in Paris and how he got around the language barrier.
"He answered in French, not in sentences, but in paragraphs," says Hrabowski, clearly pleased that a Meyerhoff scholar is valedictorian. "In paragraphs! I think that's what got it for him."
Says Ryan: "They did seem to be surprised that someone so science-oriented would be that familiar with another culture."
French, it turns out, has been among the twins' interests since childhood.
The Turners, who just turned 22 -- Brian is two minutes older -- are headed to Harvard Medical School for a highly selective program that leads to medical and doctoral degrees. They were accepted by similar programs at the Johns Hopkins University, Stanford, Yale and several other schools.
Full of energy and smiles, the Turners are effusive in their praise of Summers.
"He's become like a father figure to us," Brian says.
"In science and in everything," Ryan finishes.
Down on the farm
This did not seem to be in the cards that Summers was dealt growing up in St. Petersburg, Fla. He spent summers working on a Wisconsin farm owned by relatives, the warm Florida winters sailing catamarans around the bays.
After a tough exam in high school, he sailed out to sandbars and rolled out his sleeping bag. He got enough merit badges to make Eagle Scout.
He does point to the influence of an eighth-grade teacher, his first black instructor. The subject was science.
"My parents raised me to be open-minded and nonprejudiced, but I grew up in a white suburb, and all you know about blacks is what you read about, trouble at the high school," Summers says. "Mr. Cummings was so enthusiastic about science. It really affected me."
Still, he wasn't sure he even wanted to go to college. Farm life seemed more appealing.
"I finally decided that it would be easier to go to college than to try farming, and, if I didn't like it, go back to college," he says.
He enrolled at St. Petersburg Junior College, where a science teacher recognized his talents and took a weekend to drive Summers and other promising chemistry students to the University of West Florida, nine hours away in Pensacola.
Summers continued his education there. A professor secured a summer research job for him at the University of Florida.
"That was the first time I learned what research was all about," he says. "It was what I wanted to do."
Summers went to Emory University in Atlanta for graduate work in chemistry, where he says his adviser, Luigi Marzilli, made him work up to his potential. When he got his doctorate in only four years, he won an award for the best graduate research.
'My pushy mother'
"I was reminded of what people said about Eagle Scouts, that the only kids to get them were the ones who were inherently hard-working or the ones with a pushy mother," Summers says. "Marzilli was my pushy mother."
While at Emory, Summers agreed to tutor a senior named Holly Russell, who was having trouble keeping up in her physical chemistry course because she was so busy preparing for dental school entrance exams. Though she soon headed to Baltimore and the University of Maryland Dental School, they were married three years later.
Dr. Holly Summers is not at all surprised at the rapport her husband has with students.
"Michael was always a very good teacher," she says. "I could not get physical chemistry until he explained the fundamental properties. I got an 'A' in it after working with him."
Though it required such a change in his research methods that many at Emory advised against it, Summers took a fellowship at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda so he and his wife could be together while she finished dental school.
By the time he finished at NIH, working with top chemist Ad Bax, Holly had established a Catonsville practice, so he took the UMBC job over what appeared to be better offers.
"Everything I've done that people said would hurt my career has done just the opposite," Summers says.
At NIH, he learned the intricacies of a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer -- the NMR -- now his basic research tool as he studies the structure of the virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
A view of UMBC's NMR, one of the largest in the world, dominates the entrance to Summers' lab. A cylindrical tower that looks like a high-tech totem, the NMR is essentially a supermagnet strong enough to stop watches and mess up the code on credit cards. Its magnetic field holds the pieces of the AIDS virus in place so they can be subjected to a variety of radio waves, slowly yielding the secrets of their molecular structure.
Involving undergraduates in research is another move not usually seen as good for careers. The youngsters soak up attention and time. In many top labs, undergraduates wash the test tubes so the faculty, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows can get on with the real work.
Sharing the excitement
But Summers started working with undergraduates in his early days at UMBC. His first was Terri South, who graduated in 1988 and stayed on to get her doctorate with Summers.
As Summers tells it, South had prepared chemicals for a crucial experiment, then had to go out of town for the weekend. Summers couldn't wait, so he came in Saturday and ran the experiment. The results were perfect.
"I was so excited I went out and ran laps around the campus," he says.
Then he came back in, deleted the data from the computer and prepared a new solution of chemicals so South could run the experiment on her own on Monday.
"I wanted her to have the same feeling I had when I saw those results," he says. "I don't think she knows that to this day."
That experiment proved that part of the AIDS virus was capable of binding zinc, ending a controversy in the research community. It was the discovery that put Summers on the scientific map. It led to job offers, including one from the high-powered University of California, San Diego, in 1992. Summers talked to Hrabowski about it.
"It was in those conversations that, for the first time, I thought this could be my home," Summers says. "If Freeman were a different type of person, what he is doing here could be divisive, if people saw a black president and thought he only cared about the black students.
"But that's not the way it is. The minority students he brings to campus are the best students here. If you see a group of black students walking together on a college campus, your first thought might be, 'Oh, there goes the basketball team.' Here, it's, 'Oh, there goes the honors chemistry society.' It causes you to change your thinking. Everyone on campus is behind what he's doing."
In 1994, Summers was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, providing him with generous funding for his laboratory -- renovated at Hughes' expense -- and freedom to pursue his research objectives. He's the only Hughes investigator at a public university in Maryland.
A man to emulate
Hrabowski says Summers' strong work ethic shows the Meyerhoff scholars who work in his lab what it takes to become a scientist.
"He has exactly the kind of behavior you want to see people emulate," Hrabowski says. "It's great to see people want to be like Michael Summers, both in science and in the rest of life. He's integrated the personal and professional in a healthy way."
Around the time Summers was joining the UMBC faculty, Ryan and Brian Turner were giving up the demanding hours of their gymnastics classes and competitions to concentrate on schoolwork.
"Our parents didn't have to push us; we pushed each other," says Brian. Their father is a teacher who works in the prison education system. Their mother is a nurse.
Says Ryan: "If one of us got an 'A' on a test and the other a 'B,' you'd work extra hard to make sure you got an 'A' the next time."
Their desire to be doctors dates to their mother's bout with breast cancer.
"I think we were about 10 years old. We would go to the hospital with her and she would come out and try to be happy, but she was real tired," Brian says. "When those doctors cured her, it was something we wanted to be able to do."
By their senior year, the Turners were traveling to two high schools and Salisbury State University to get the courses they wanted. And running on the track team.
"We never could get [advanced placement] physics," Ryan says. "No one offered that."
They got identical scores on their SATS -- they won't say what -- and were ready to go to Duke University when Hrabowski came courting.
Guiding them through the UMBC campus, pointing out that they didn't even know who the president of Duke was, Hrabowski took the twins into Summers' lab, promising they could work there if they came to UMBC.
The Turners showed up in the fall. Summers gave Ryan and fellow Meyerhoff freshman Danielle Smith of Silver Spring a project on the role of zinc in the regulation of metal toxicity in living cells that had stumped a postdoctoral fellow for three years.
During the next 1 1/2 years, they solved the puzzle, publishing a paper in the journal Nature Structural Biology last year.
Chelsea Stalling, a Friends School graduate from Baltimore, has had perhaps the most prestigious publication of this group, an article on an HIV protein structure published last year in Science, the profession's top journal.
"There are very successful scientists who go their entire careers without getting an article in Science," Summers says.
But the professor and his students did more than publish papers. They also got to know each other, on the mountain bike excursions, on a yearly skiing trip to Maine and in the hours and hours of work in the lab, late at night, early in the morning, all through the weekends.
"We talk about everything," Summers says. "During the O. J. Simpson trial, we talked about it constantly.
"It was very tense when he was acquitted, but you learn so much about other people's points of view. The important thing is that we talk about everything. It's all out on the table. We hold nothing back. We've really become like a family."
So much so that when the UMBC dormitories closed for two weeks last summer, the Turner twins stayed at Summers' house in Ellicott City.
"I was really glad it was while my father was there visiting," he says. Then he's silent for a few moments, contemplating the journey of the generations that took his father from a childhood in a West Virginia coal-mining town where the racial lines were clear and the animosities deep, to an engineering degree on the GI Bill, to a comfortable life in Florida, to his son's home in Maryland where he met these two brilliant young African-Americans from the Eastern Shore.
Summers has an 8-year-old daughter, Samantha, and he has cut back on the 75-hour weeks he spent in the lab when he started at UMBC. He's home early the three nights a week his wife works late in her dental office in the basement; he cooks dinner for Samantha.
"I have a career, but I need some time away from it, my days off," says Holly Summers. "Mike doesn't. He wakes up every morning eager to get to the lab. He really does what he loves to do."
Sometimes when he gets to the lab, he finds a bunch of students who have worked all night, each more eager than the next to show him what they've found. "There's nothing more exciting than that," Summers says.
Out on the trail in Patapsco Valley State Park, Summers brings the stragglers up to the source of the laughter. Brian Turner's bike has gone one way and he has gone the other.
"I guess we shouldn't take such glee at the misfortunes of others," says Summers, trying to be serious. But he's often the one leading the laughter, teasing students who fall trying to make a grade that he pedals with ease.
"Well, I do check to see how profusely they are bleeding first," he says.
Then he's gleefully taunting them to get up the next hill, to beat him to the top.