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