Learning
Science/Mathematics
by
Doing
Science/Mathematics
Bill Sofer
Dept. Genetics
Waksman Institute
Rutgers
Learning
Modern Biological Science
by
Doing
Modern Biological Science
Bill Sofer
Dept. Genetics
Waksman Institute
Rutgers
What’s the best way to
learn science?
I don’t know.
But, like many of you
I have drawn on my own
experience
to 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:
HiGene
The High School Genome
Sequencing Project
Waksman Student
Scholars Program
Drew Vershon
Marty Nemeroff
Susan Coletta
Jeff Charney
Waksman Student
Scholars Program
Supported by:
NIH (SEPA)
NSF (ITEST)
Howard Hughes
GE Healthcare