Learning Science/Mathematics

byDoing

Science/Mathematics

Bill SoferDept. Genetics

Waksman InstituteRutgers

Learning Modern Biological Science

byDoing

Modern Biological Science

Bill SoferDept. Genetics

Waksman InstituteRutgers

What’s the best way tolearn science?

I don’t know.

But, like many of youI have drawn on my own

experienceto come up with an answer

(guess).

My own experience is that I hardly learned any science in high school or

college.

I think that my idea of science at the time was that it was a thicket of

facts, and that the job of the scientist was, by

some mysterious process, to come up

with more facts.

When I wasn’t asleep, I was most interested in those facts that were relevant to practical matters like human

health and technology.

The words “creativity”, “excitement”, “taste”, and “beauty” weren’t ever mentioned in the

science classroom.

The most successful of my fellow classmates

were those who memorized the most, did the most practice

problems, and were the best at following

instructions in the lab.

I was shocked when I got to graduate school

(how and why I went to graduate school is another long story that is best left untold)

I found people there who, while knowing a lot

of facts, were most excited about what

wasn’t known.(to some, what was known was

boring, and they were clearly bored when they tried teaching it)

These people found things out by

“experiments”. I was surprised to find

that one purpose of experiments was to convince ones peers that what they had found was correct.

Often they made mistakes.

Sometimes the most pursuasive scientists

were the least right, and vice versa

Science was being done by a community of

people trying to figure out how the world

worked by arguing with each other to find out

who was right

Therefore the contrast:

School -> emphasis on what is known; bow to

authority

Science -> emphasis on what wasn’t known; fight with authority

So...What’s the best way to

learn science?

I don’t know. But I suggest that we

might do better by having students engage

in activities that are closer to the way that

science is actually practiced rather than by

doing the things that they do now.

How do you do that?

Let me present an example of one way

The Waksman Student Scholars Program has been ongoing for 12+

years.

Here’s how it works

Students and their teachers come to the

Waksman Institute during the month of July.

Two students and one teacher per school.

There they are presented with a

research problem.

They learn the fundamentals of the

problem in the summer, and during the

academic year they recruit additional

students and work on the problem in their

schools.

They come back to Rutgers six times during

the year to report on their progress.

At the end of the year, in June, they publish

their results in the form of a poster presentation.

The current research problem involves a little worm called C. remanei.

It looks very much like the worm C. elegans, a widely used “model”

organism.

The PROBLEM:

How closely are the two worms related?

One way to find that out is through their DNA’s.

We cloned a collection of DNA pieces from C.

remanei and gave individual clones to

different schools

The C. elegans genome had already been

sequenced (it was the first

multicellular organism whose sequence was

known)

At each school, teams of students carried out

some of the laboratory manipulations of molecular biology

Ultimately, the DNA from their clones were

sequenced(thanks to GE

Healthcare) and the students analyzed the

results

Their raw data looks like this:

No one knew what would turn up.

Students (and their teachers) had to deal

with questions like these:

How accurate is the sequence?

How would you increase its accuracy?

Is the same or similar sequence found in the genome of C. remanei?

What tools are available to do these similarity

searches?

How do they work?

How do you measure similarity?

If you find a similarity, what is the best alignment between the

two sequences?

Is there a best alignment?

How do you find it?

If they find a similar sequence, what are the

odds of finding that match (similarity) by

chance?

What does it depend on?

Does the sequence code for a protein?

How do you know?

How could you find out?

Can you do an alignment of the protein

sequences?

What’s the advantage (disadvantage) of doing an alignment of strings

with 20 different characters as opposed

to one with four characters?

How many sequences would you have to

compare before you were confident that you

were getting a good estimate of the

similarity between the two organisms?

Why might two sequences

(A in remanei and A’ in elegans; B in remanei

and B’ in elegans) show different amounts of

similarity?

One could go on and on...

Some students were able to actually publish their sequences. That is

they submitted their sequences to Genbank

and had them accepted.They got their names in

the literature.

Does this work educationally?

Do students learn more?

Do all students profit from this experience?

I don’t know.

What I do know is that they’re getting a taste of science that is much closer to the real thing.

We’re trying to develop a nationwide program to

implement this program:

HiGeneThe High School

Genome Sequencing Project

Waksman Student Scholars Program

Drew VershonMarty NemeroffSusan ColettaJeff Charney

Waksman Student Scholars Program

Supported by: NIH (SEPA)NSF (ITEST)

Howard HughesGE Healthcare