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TRANSCRIPT
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DIAPO 1
Improving the Quality of Science Education in the Life Sciences at the Pre-‐University Level
Jorge E. Allende Co President of Corporación RELAB Alternate Governor representing Chile in the BG of ICGEB May, 2015
Objectives:
1. To increase the perception of our societies of the importance and relevance of this knowledge of biology and its applications to their cultural and socioeconomic development
2. Attract more of our youth to careers in basic and applied biology
Most countries that are Members of the ICGEB need to increase the numbers of their men and women that dedicate themselves to scientific research and development. We lack a critical mass of scientists to tackle the huge problems of our societies. Biology plays a key role in many of those problems.
In DIAPO 2 we see that most of us need to multiply by 5 or 10 our numbers of scientists
One of the main reasons for this lack of critical mass is the way that science is taught in most of in our primary and secondary schools – Unfortunately most science teachers are content to transmit a lot of definitions, strange names and formulas and equations that students are supposed to memorize and to repeat back without any real understanding of what they mean and what relation this has to
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their surroundings and their quality of life. We, scientists know that science is a fascinating adventure, that it is a road that presents us with great surprises at every step and that amazes us with the unbelievable beauty of the harmony and balance that we find in the Universe and also in the smallest living cell. If we want to attract young boys and girls to science, we have to change the way the sciences are taught and to do this we need to work with the science teachers. They are our most important allies in convincing our societies of the great relevance of science for the human and social development of our nations.
How can scientists work with the teachers of primary and secondary schools? I have met and discussed with thousands of science teachers in Chile and in several other countries in Latin America and I am convinced that the great majority of them are eager to improve their practice and are very receptive to all our initiatives to work together to make science learning much more fun and also more stimulating.
One of the deficits in the life sciences is that this area in the last decades has undergone such a rapid and revolutionary explosion of knowledge that the institutions that train our biology science teachers have not been able to keep up with this deluge of new ideas and concepts and in areas such as molecular biology and genomics, the teachers have not been able to keep up with current knowledge. To try to help in this area, the Latin American Network of Biological Sciences started more than fifteen years ago to organize intensive training courses for secondary school biology teachers in molecular biology. In these courses, taught in some of our best Universities we included the use of experiments such as
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transformation of bacteria with foreign genes, PCR amplification of DNA, and bioinformatic analysis of genes in the great gene banks of the world. Teachers appreciated very much these courses that were carried out in Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica and México but expressed their frustration because they could not transmit to their students the most stimulating part of those courses which were precisely the experiments. There are two main reasons why this was not possible: The obvious one was that their school did not have the modern equipment to carry out the laboratory experiments. The second one which is more serious is that in the initial training of teachers lack the experience of designing experimental protocols that include all the necessary controls that are necessary to be sure that the experiment will give you clear answers to the question you are asking. In 2001, I had the honor of being invited to a meeting of the Pontificial Academy of Sciences that titled “The Challenges for Science Education for the 21sr Century”. I mentioned the idea of having a mobile laboratory that could visit schools to allow the students to do the experiments. –
Slide 5. It took 10 before that idea was implemented
In the year 2000 – All the Academies of the World met in Tokyo in June in a Conference titled “Transition to Sustainability in the 21st Century”.
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In that meeting I had the Honor to speak in a Session dedicated to Science Education in which the two other speakers were Dr. Bruce Alberts who at that time was President of the US National Academy of Sciences and Prof. Pierre Léna from the French Academy of
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Science, a renowned astrophysicist but also one of the leaders of the science education program called La main a la Pate of the French Academy. Both of these speakers spoke about a method called Inquiry Based Science Education or (IBSE). This approach tried to reproduce in the class rooms the way scientists generate knowledge in the laboratory. That is, the students pose questions about what they observe in their environment –formulate hypotheses to answer those questions and tested those hypotheses with simple experiments which they performed with very inexpensive materials and analyzed the results obtained and ask themselves whether their answers can be extrapolated to a more general concepts . To me the presentation of these two great scientists was a revelation of how scientists and scientific institutions like the Academies could greatly improve science education. All of these projects, however, focused on primary education -‐ We then decided to use the Chilean Academy of Sciences to introduce this approach in Chile with the help of the American and the French Academies and actually initially were very successful. In 2003 we started with 6 schools and 1000 children in a poor neighborhood close to the airport in Santiago and by the year 2009 we had 270 schools and 100.000 children in all Regions of Chile and 12 Universities collaborating. The project was funded by the Ministry of Education. Unfortunately education is very close to politics and in 2010 we had two events – One was an earthquake grade 8.6 in the Richter scale and we also had a political shake with a change of government that decided that our project was too expensive and discontinued it during 4 years. After 2014 We are now in the process of re-‐doing this with the primary school children and also going into secondary education.
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In the meantime between 2004 and 2011 I was working with the Inter Academy Panel in trying to bring Inquiry based science education to all Regions of the World.
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In October 2010 we organized a meeting in York University on bringing IBSE to secondary education. This Conference was sponsored by the Wellcome Trust which had built the National Science Learning Center for the UK at York. I visited the Headquarters of the Wellcome Trust in London. There I learned that this Foundation, which had financed some of my research in molecular biology, had a Fund to support bringing the Life Sciences to Society. The maximum grant from this fund was 30.000 British Pounds. In a meeting of the RELAB Regional Executive Council in Santiago in 2011, we decided to apply to this (DIAPO 8) Wellcome Trust Fund and presented a project in which three Latin American countries participated : México, Costa Rica and Chile with the support of their principal universities – The UNAM in México, the University of Costa Rica and Chile with the University of Chile in our country
DIAPO 9-‐10-‐11-‐12 Show the Fundamental Concepts which were included in a learning module
These 4 fundamental concepts can be taught in a 5 day course that includes a series of 8 lectures and four experiments. The lectures describe the idea and experimental findings that generated these fundamental concepts. The experiments included in the course provide experimental evidence of the validity these concepts. We will come back to this point.
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DIAPO 13
The last day of the course, we dedicated to an evaluation of what has been learned, we also discuss how these concepts are being used for application in medicine, agriculture and in preservation of the environment.
The process is then simple:
The teachers that approve the course can choose to ask the University to send a portable laboratory to their school. Prior to that they take the responsibility to teach the theoretical classes (we provide the power points used in the University which they are free to use).
The portable laboratory has all the equipment necessary to carry out the experiments and also all the enzymes reagents. As you can see in the figure this portable laboratory fits in a suitcase with wheels and can be carried in the trunk of any car.
DIAPO 14 AND 15
What materials does it include?
It includes:
• PCR machine or Thermocycler • Transiluminator? • Power supplies for DNA and protein electrophoresis • A couple of small centrifuges • Automatic micropipettes • Water baths or thermoblocks • Electrophoresis chambers
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• 37° incubators to grow bacteria
The total price for the equipment to allow a group of 30 students to work in groups of three costs approximately USD$ 10.000.
We don’t count computers connected to internet which these days are in most of our schools
In consumables which include restriction enzymes, micropipet tips, gloves, sterile plats have a cost of approximately US$ 500 per school visited.
In Chile, however, we include something which is very important. We send two doctoral students that accompany the portable laboratories to the schools. These students are using every day these same techniques in their thesis work and know them very well. Therefore, they provide a very important support for the teachers in setting up the experiments and in explaining the protocols to the secondary school students . But their presence is much more important than that because they are encouraged to tell the secondary school students about their research and this has a great impact because the two groups belong to the same generation – they talk the same language, they are interested in the same things but the doctoral students are fascinated by science and by the discovery of new facts about nature. It is the first time that the secondary school boys and girls realize that young, intelligent countrymen have chosen science and a career and they learn that these young people are travelling to present their work in international Congresses or publishing work that is quoted in other countries. This is a real revelation to them.
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DIAPO 16
We actually copied this scheme of using graduate students from an NSF program called GK-‐12 in the USA, which provides fellowships for postgraduate work in STEM but requires the fellows to dedicate some time to help in science education in the pre-‐University level. In 10 years, NSF had 11000 fellows in this program and it was carefully evaluated –One important result was that the fellows that dedicated time to help in education did not take longer to graduate and found it easier to get jobs because they had experience in teaching.
We had someone from NSF to inform our National Research Council (CONICYT) about this program and they were so impressed that starting in 2013 all doctoral fellowships awarded by CONICYT that covers 70% of all doctoral students in the country are required to spend 100 hours of their time in activities of pre-‐university education. This is considered a retribution for their fellowship support and I think it is a very positive policy.
The experiments carried out in the course for teachers and in the school visited by the portable laboratory
To illustrate the way phenotype depends on genotype which is the essence of fundamental concept 1, we study the capacity to detect the bitter taste of a compound named phenyl thiocarbamide or PTC. It has been known for several decades that the majority of human populations, detect a very bitter taste of this compound but about 20 to 25% of persons cannot detect this taste. So we ask the
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students to try some papers impregnated with PTC and to record whether they detect the taste or not (Amazon sells this papers for USD$ 14 for a 1000 strips of papers with PTC).
Afterwards we ask them to make a wash of their mouth with a physiological saline water and afterwards to prepare DNA through a very simple procedure centrifuging the mucosa cells to a pellet and making a mix with Chelex and heated at 100°C for 10 minutes. This should yield a preparation of the student DNA.
It is known that the great majority of the persons that cannot detect the taste of PTC is due to a mutation that occurs in the 145th nucleotide of a taste receptor called TAS 38, Therefore, the procedure goes on to use the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to amplify a part of the TAS 38 gene that contains the putative mutation. This PCR procedure, using the proper primers generates a piece of the TAS 38 gene that is 221 base pairs long and that can easily be detected in a gel electrophoresis that separates the fragments of DNA by their size. The mutation in base 145 responsible for the loss of activity of the taste receptor as is shown in DIAPO 17 is a charge from a C to a G. This allows us to use a restriction enzyme Hae II which cuts DNA in both strain when it finds a sequence GGCC. This sequence is present in the original receptor but not in the mutated receptor. The students cut their amplified DNA with Hae III and analyze the 221 amplified fragment of their DNA in an agarose gel.
The tasters should see two fragments of 177 bp and of 44 bp while the non tasters should continue to see only the 221 original fragment. Of course that only is true for the ones that are
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homozygous for the mutating. If they are heterozygous they will see all three fragments and they should have been able to detect the bitter taste not as strongly as the ones that are homozygous for the unmutated receptor. This is a very nice experiment which can be done in two sessions of 4 hours of lab work and it is something the students can do with their own genetic material.
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2 Transfection of bacteria with a gene that codes for a green fluorescent protein of a sea medusa. To do this we use a plasmid (pGLO) which has genes that codes for a beta lactamose which makes the bacteria resistant the antibiotic ampicilim. The gene that codes for the green fluorescent protein is under the control of a transcriptional regulator which is activated by the presence of arabinose (ara C).
After growing the transformed bacteria overnight, the students can see that bacteria transformed with pGLO grow in the presence of ampicilin, but that they are not fluorescent when irradiated with UV light. However, if they are grown in a medium that contains arabinose, they show a bright green fluorescence.
This experiment demonstrates fundamental concepto 2 which says that the genes in a cell can be regulated in their expression. It also demonstrates fundamental concept 3 that says that the genetic code is practically universal and that a bacteria can correctly read the genetic messages coding for a protein of the sea medusa DIAPO 18 Y 19.
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3. The third experiment uses computers connected to internet to analyze the NCBI genome banks. We provide a nucleotide sequence of about 200 nucleotides and give instructions to them to run a blast analysis on this sequence so that they will find out what gene it is and also obtain a series of related genes that are very similar but contain necessary numbers of mutations. This analysis shows to the students the power of bioinformatics and genomics and illustrates the 4th fundamental concept that says that it is possible to study the evolutionary process at the molecular level and to make phylogenetic tress without looking at an animal, plant or microorganism.
The cost is reasonable
If you consider the initial cost of the portable laboratory at USD$ 10.000 and that in 2 years it has allowed 450 students to do experiments, the cost per student is about 22 dollars – If you include the reagents and material it adds up to about 3.0 USD/student. But obviously this year we will be continue to use the laboratory with essentially the same equipment for a couple of years more. The cost of this project is not as high as one may think and is equivalent to giving a text book to each student.
Opinions of main participants in this project
During 2013 and 2014 the implementation of this project, we tried to evaluate its impact. This is a serious problem because the real impact of educational projects takes many years, even decades, to have a real effect. What we have been able to do is to get the perception of the main participants in the project: secondary school
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teachers, secondary school students and doctoral students. I will provide a sample of what we obtained.
Opinions of secondary teachers that experienced the visit of portable laboratory in their classrooms
Increased interest in science "the students participate more now (after the portable laboratory course) in biology classes, they are more interested in scientific subjects and the idea of doing research on their own." (teacher)
Consider science as a possible career "one of the effects of the portable labs has been a greater interest in considering a career in the area of molecular biology or biotechnology" (teacher)
A change in relation teacher-‐student when we discussed the clear possibility of the student´s future in research as compared to the lack of many opportunities to work in the area of science in the past, a personal bond was formed between teacher-‐student" for having had the opportunity to realize this course. "when they saw that when they reached my age they would probably be much further advanced professionally as compared to my situation as teacher: I realized some special bond had been formed. (teacher)
Better grades in students that had taken the course. "the students show a better command of the material, they presented better work in the assignments (...) Its curious that one student had failed six subjects up to this date and then after the portable lab experience, he had better grades in both of his regular school biology courses, the general and elective courses." (teacher)
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Teachers appreciation of their participation in the course. "it was a privilege to take part in this interesting and vanguardistic laboratory and a double privilege to bring this experience to the students (...) to show them the world of science." (teacher)
"The students were very excited (...); there were two doctoral students and the experiments all worked out very well that day and the students very pleased. When Dr. Allende came to visit the school, the students were very excited and they took photographs with him, they wanted to carry his overcoat and accompany him to his car. They were very impressed when they heard that he knew Watson and Crick personally. Among the two different groups of students present that day, they made friends among themselves, as if they had a common bond. (teacher).
About the course for teachers at the University"it was a wonderful week for me and it changed my 'switch' as to how I was working in my classroom: I was working for my salary like everyone else, but suddenly I was thrilled, this week I was rubbing elbows with real scientists and it was wonderful! One of the 'plus" sides, as the doc says, after one finishes the university one can take (postgraduate) courses and contact other scientists doing science and then one can teach science directly from contacts with scientists." (teacher)
About the impact of the Doctoral Students in the School
"the doctoral students that came here to the our school to do the portable labs were bombarded with questions: what is that? (the doctorate) and: what kind of career is that? They would chat together and see that it was possible (to be a scientist), perhaps
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they wouldn´t buy a new car with the first salary but on the long run, they would have many other benefits." (teacher)
The opinion of secondary school students (we have more than 400 replies) Questions – How did you like the experience of learning molecular biology by doing experiments in your school in the portable laboratory?
Answer "Truthfully, when I heard about doing this laboratory, its not as if I hadn´t paid attention but, I thought to myself, just another thing to do! But after I arrived and I saw so much activity and interest in participating in the laboratory: there were people from the United States, Northamericans, Cubans, stuff like that, and they came to teach us! I became very interested, mostly because we could "apply" the science; because we did experiments on ourselves, taking samples of saliva, and also samples of cells. Then we made samples of bacteria...I liked it very much,..and all the rest was very good.' (student).
Question Do you think this approach helps you to understand better some of the discussions in the news about transgenic organisms, stem cells, relations between mutation and cancer? Answer I think it helps a lot because doing the experiments in much better than theoretical classes and allow us to understand better (student)
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Question How did you like learning concepts of molecular biology by doing experiments with the portable laboratory? I think it was a beautiful experience to be able to use all the knowledge that they taught us in the school is very satisfactory. In addition it is great to learn the new techniques that are now been used (student). Question Do you think this approach should also be used to teach other experimental sciences? Answer It would be great. This is good for biology but other students may be more interested in chemistry or physics. This approach would generate an integral approach to all of the sciences which share the same method (student). Question: How did like the experience of doing experiments in molecular biology in the portable laboratory? Answer It was a beautiful experience because I learned about the topics I like best and this allowed me to orient myself with regards to my future and what I would like to do some years from now. Question: What recommendation do you have to improve the effectiveness of the portable laboratories?
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Answer You should look for more financial support from the government so that you can purchase more equipment so that you could expand this program to reach other parts of the country and other areas of science (student from the National Institute). To the question Have you ever met in a person a scientist or a doctoral student in science? More than 85% of the students answered no. This explains why so few choose scientific career. They lack of role model to relate with. Opinions of Doctoral Students
Questions: How was the experience of being a monitor in visits of the portable laboratory to secondary schools? What was the most remarkable and the most difficult?
For me it was very positive experience in several aspects. In the first place, the role of monitor allowed me to develop capacities to communicate and to manage a group of young students, an experience in which we had no previous experience in the doctoral program. These capacities are important because most probably I will take up an academic career in which an important part of the work will be teaching and up to now we have had no training on how to transmit what we have learned in our studies. Another opportunity that I had in the job of a monitor is to tell the secondary school students about the work that we do in our thesis and to transmit to the students what the scientists do for society. It is easy for us to talk to the secondary school students because we belong to
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the same generation and speak their same language (Sandra Moreira – she received her Ph.D. in 2014).
Question : Do you think that it is positive for Doctoral and Master Students to participate in an activity such as this? Will it be a useful experience in your future career?
Answer : I firmly believe that the future of science necessarily depends on its value for society. For that reason any person that wishes to continue in the world of research should, at least once, have the opportunity to approach other people and transmit to them the relevance of what they do in science. If we lose contact with society, science will stagnate.
Personally I have enjoyed very much this work. I like the possibility of contacting the secondary students and to transmit to them my vocation and listen to their commentaries and to watch them enjoy what we do. My intention, every time that I go to one of these classes is to go beyond the technical knowledge. I aspire to transmit to them the enchantment, the beauty of science and what science can do for us. Sometimes the time is too short but I like to believe that I have achieved something, although it may be little. For the same reason I hope that this project can last a long time, so that it will be accessible to all the students that wish to participate (doctoral student-‐ Camilo Allende).
I would like to suggest that participation in this project as monitors could be opened to others, not restricting it to graduate students. In my personal case, I already have received the Doctor’s degree and I am no longer a student nevertheless, I would like to continue participating in the coming years.
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I want to add that this initiative should not be stopped. It must continue progressing reaching more schools and more regions of the country. If you accept me, I am willing to continue helping in this marvelous initiative (Dr. Sofía Sepúlveda).
Competition for Essays about the Portable Laboratories Another way in which we receive feed back from the student that had the experience of the portable laboratories is to invite them to participate in a Essay Contest open to all of them. Towards the end of the year we receive essays from students that had the experience of the visits of the portable laboratories to write a short essay (about 300 words) in which they answer two questions: DIAPO 20 1.-‐What experiment of the portable lab they liked best and why? 2.-‐ How would the use the methods learned in those experiments to find a solution to a problem they detect in their sorroundings? Approximately 10% of the studens submit essays and we use the Allende Connelly Foundation to give a USD$ 500 prize to the winner of the best essay which is also published in the University web page. This help us to see that the students continue to think about what they did and to try to see what use they can imagine. We have been pleasantly surprised by the very good quality of the essay and the ideas. A girl that belongs to a family that has a genetic disease that affects the tendons want to find a cure for that disease. Another boy want
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to develop bacteria that produces non contaminating fuels. Another want to combat drug addiction in the neighborhood where he lives by causing a very unpleasant reaction to the drugs. Another want to use bacteria to generate “good “ lipo proteins that help to avoid circulatory programs. We are happy that this initiative keeps them thinking about what they learned in the experiments Geographical Scale Up in Latin America Based on these very general but very positive responses, we have decided to try to scale up this project in Chile and in other countries. We are happy to report that in Latin America in 2014 Uruguay and its Universidad de la República has purchased a portable laboratory with a UNESCO grant and has organized course and will start to visit schools. In 2015, Brazil has also bought a portable lab and will run a course for biology teachers in Curitiba and will also start to visit schools this year. Panamá has already bought a portable lab and will start with the collaboration of Costa Rica to implement this project. Perú has also shown interest by sending an observer to the course we ran in January 2015 in Santiago and hopefully they will soon join this project. Geographical Scale-‐Up in Chile of Portable Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Genomics In 2015 the Ministry of Education has agreed to purchase 4 portable laboratories and will try to implement in 2015 visits in 4 Regions of the Country outside of Santiago with the help of four
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Universities. (Universidad de La Serena, Catholic University of Valparaíso, Universidad de Concepción, and Universidad Austral of Valdivia). Hopefully in 2016, we can increase it to 8 or 9 portable labs in the country that will visit close 100 Secondary schools per year. Scaling – Up the coverage of biology topics with the help of RELAB With the support of RELAB and CONICYT of Chile and UNESCO, in 2015 we are organizing workshops that we hope can generate two more new theoretical and practical modules that can be used (23) to learn fundamental concepts dealing with “Proteins and Enzymes” and with “Fertilization and Early Embryo Development of Animals”. This workshops should allow us to test with biology teachers and secondary schools tow new portable laboratories in those two topics. We hope that other countries can do similar efforts in other important chapters of the biology that is taught in secondary schools such as microbiology, cell biology of animal cells, cell biology of plant cells, neurobiology, etc. It is hoped that this will allow us to have 6 to 10 theoretical and practical modules which can provide our secondary school students to be exposed to a reasonable number of experiments that can help them to have a good understanding of where we are in the life sciences. This is an effort in which the ICGEB can help in the organization of workshops to generate these modules and to have a repository of theoretical and practical modules and materials and protocols of classes and practical experiments that may be used by the scientists and educators of the Member States.
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Why not other experimental sciences? Obviously, this idea is not exclusively for biology but can be implemented for all the other experimental sciences and we could join UNESCO, the Inter Academy Panel, ICSU and the large scientific societies to expand this project in many directions.