learning science/mathematics by doing science/mathematics bill sofer dept. genetics waksman...
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![Page 1: Learning Science/Mathematics by Doing Science/Mathematics Bill Sofer Dept. Genetics Waksman Institute Rutgers](https://reader036.vdocuments.mx/reader036/viewer/2022062301/56649d495503460f94a25e5a/html5/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Learning Science/Mathematics
byDoing
Science/Mathematics
Bill SoferDept. Genetics
Waksman InstituteRutgers
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Learning Modern Biological Science
byDoing
Modern Biological Science
Bill SoferDept. Genetics
Waksman InstituteRutgers
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What’s the best way tolearn science?
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I don’t know.
But, like many of youI have drawn on my own
experienceto come up with an answer
(guess).
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My own experience is that I hardly learned any science in high school or
college.
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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.
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When I wasn’t asleep, I was most interested in those facts that were relevant to practical matters like human
health and technology.
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The words “creativity”, “excitement”, “taste”, and “beauty” weren’t ever mentioned in the
science classroom.
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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.
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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)
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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)
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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.
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Often they made mistakes.
Sometimes the most pursuasive scientists
were the least right, and vice versa
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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
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Therefore the contrast:
School -> emphasis on what is known; bow to
authority
Science -> emphasis on what wasn’t known; fight with authority
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So...What’s the best way to
learn science?
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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.
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How do you do that?
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Let me present an example of one way
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The Waksman Student Scholars Program has been ongoing for 12+
years.
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Here’s how it works
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Students and their teachers come to the
Waksman Institute during the month of July.
Two students and one teacher per school.
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There they are presented with a
research problem.
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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.
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They come back to Rutgers six times during
the year to report on their progress.
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At the end of the year, in June, they publish
their results in the form of a poster presentation.
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The current research problem involves a little worm called C. remanei.
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It looks very much like the worm C. elegans, a widely used “model”
organism.
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The PROBLEM:
How closely are the two worms related?
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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
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The C. elegans genome had already been
sequenced (it was the first
multicellular organism whose sequence was
known)
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At each school, teams of students carried out
some of the laboratory manipulations of molecular biology
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Ultimately, the DNA from their clones were
sequenced(thanks to GE
Healthcare) and the students analyzed the
results
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Their raw data looks like this:
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No one knew what would turn up.
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Students (and their teachers) had to deal
with questions like these:
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How accurate is the sequence?
How would you increase its accuracy?
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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?
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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?
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If they find a similar sequence, what are the
odds of finding that match (similarity) by
chance?
What does it depend on?
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Does the sequence code for a protein?
How do you know?
How could you find out?
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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?
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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?
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Why might two sequences
(A in remanei and A’ in elegans; B in remanei
and B’ in elegans) show different amounts of
similarity?
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One could go on and on...
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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.
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Does this work educationally?
Do students learn more?
Do all students profit from this experience?
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I don’t know.
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What I do know is that they’re getting a taste of science that is much closer to the real thing.
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We’re trying to develop a nationwide program to
implement this program:
HiGeneThe High School
Genome Sequencing Project
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Waksman Student Scholars Program
Drew VershonMarty NemeroffSusan ColettaJeff Charney
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Waksman Student Scholars Program
Supported by: NIH (SEPA)NSF (ITEST)
Howard HughesGE Healthcare