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2007; Wiley; Volume: 35; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/bmb.53

1539-3429

Graham R. Parslow,

Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Biomedical Research

Over the last five years more than $900 million has been spent on new curriculum, staff, and buildings at the University of Michigan for life science research and teaching. The hub of the research effort is the Life Sciences Institute, central to the Ann Arbor campus, with adjacent new teaching buildings and the University's Bioinformatics Program. This build up has been justified by a perception of a “life sciences future” that derives from basic science, health science, and the humanities. The web site lets you find all the relevant information about study and research at Michigan and prominently features a tutorial on stem cells as a promotion of research that has enormous potential for advances in health practices. It is a must-see tutorial. It is professionally authored and integrates all of the multimedia elements that make for good teaching, including a professional voice-over of the message. The first section, Stem Cells Defined, gives a graphic overview of embryonic, cord, and adult stem cells and their potential. The level is well suited to a general audience. The content is informative and nonthreatening by avoiding terms such as pluri-potent that only a person who already knew the field would understand. The graphics are highly professional and set a standard rarely seen on non-commercial material. Additional material covers the ethics and politics of stem cell research. The home page begins with “Welcome to open learning to open minds.” This is a sister project to the well established Wikipedia that was a fledgling entity when commented on in this journal two years previously [1]. The subject areas within Wikiversity are humanities, physical sciences, life sciences, practical arts and sciences, mathematics, engineering and technology, interdisciplinary studies, social sciences, education, media and finally professions (architecture, law and medicine). Wikiversity provides free multimedia learning materials, resources, and curricula for all teaching levels and in multiple languages, depending on what is contributed. Just as Wikipedia has become a dominant web resource with an enthusiastic following, Wikiversity has similar promise to grow as a hub of collaborative learning projects. This may be the killer application in education that many have tried to create, but none have succeeded. Learners and teachers are invited to become editors of this wiki website where everyone can edit the pages. At the time of visiting the site there was a logo and motto contest for Wikiversity indicating that these are still early days. At this early phase I could not find any content applicable to my own teaching, but knowing how rapidly wikipedia has grown gives hope that this will become a major source in the near future. Beyond Wikiversity the world of Wiki now also includes Wiktionary (dictionary and thesaurus), Wikiquote (a collection of quotations), Wikinews (current events), Wikispecies (a directory of species), Wikibooks (free textbooks and manuals), Wikisource (a free-content multimedia library), and Meta-Wiki (a feedback forum for wiki users and contributors). A subsequent website review below introduces Wikiquote. More than 29 million people visit About.com each month. I arrived there when I needed to give a lecture on bilirubin and found an excellent image for an overview at z.about.com/d/biology/1/0/L/3/bilirubin.gif. About is amazing in breadth covering such interests as home repairs, recipes, movie trailers, or car buying tips. They claim that “No matter where you are on About.com, or how you got here, you'll always find content that is relevant to your needs.” Founded in 1996 an expert panel of 500 guides have contributed their wisdom. To quote “For instance, our Headaches Guide was recently recognized as a top patient advocate by the National Headache Foundation. Our Table Tennis Guide is a two-time Olympian and our Pediatrics Guide is a board certified Pediatrician & Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics.” Guides are selected for their ability to provide the most interesting information for users, and for their passion for their subject and the Net. The selection process is rigorous – only 10% of those that apply are chosen. The About Guide System features 24 content channels. There is primary information and an enormous number of links. It is not particularly easy to target what you want, but there is a search box that cuts down the time spent in zooming down through the content. The article that brought me to the site is “Biliary Excretion of Waste Products: Elimination of Bilirubin.” Among the other facts there you will find there is “Bilirubin is a useless and toxic breakdown product of hemoglobin, which also means that it is generated in large quantities. In the time it takes you to read this sentence aloud, roughly 20 million of your red blood cells have died and roughly 5 quintillion (5 × 1015) molecules of hemoglobin are in need of disposal. The dead and damaged red blood cells are picked up by phagocytic cells throughout the body (including Kuppfer cells in the liver) and digested. The iron is precious and is efficiently recycled. The globin chains are protein and are catabolized and their components reused. However, hemoglobin also contains a porphyrin called heme that cannot be recycled and must be eliminated. Elimination of heme is accomplished in a series of steps”: The diagram that follows at the site is a paragon of simplicity and accuracy. Julius Bonello MD from the University of Illinois is a man who has taken the less travelled path and visited the graves of such medical luminaries as John Snow, when others might visit the tomb of Carl Marx. Fame and celebrity are not high on the priorities of most scientists and this means that there is not an established route of pilgrimage to many of the historical places that have seen great leaps in our scientific understanding. Ever more scientists are writing informative biographies and I would like to commend one of my recent readings to your attention, namely “The Beginners Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize” by Peter Doherty [2]. However a book cannot so effectively immerse you in the atmosphere and times as being at a place and seeing how the appropriate intersection of the right person, time and place led to the discovery of the blood circulation (William Harvey) or the theory of evolution (Charles Darwin). By serendipity Julius Bonello was handed a book entitled, “A Traveler's Guide to the History of Biology and Medicine” (1986) written by Eric Pengelley, prior to embarking for a medical conference in Italy in1999. Intrigued by what he read, he visited three of the featured sites in the guide. Bonello relates “I felt that I had gained much from incorporating these sites into my trip and that the guide's information greatly enhanced the experience of the actual visit.” However the information was dated and sometimes inaccurate so Bonello became the new editor of “A Traveler's Guide to the History of Biology and Medicine” and has published his version online. There are many engrossing photographs taken by Bonello to illustrate the sites he has now visited in a systematic manner. I read with greatest interest the sights and locations in the UK because I had visited several of those sights. Such locations as Oxford and Cambridge, while needing no introduction, grow in interest when the paths less-taken are illuminated. Bonello has high praise for the Wellcome Museum of Medical History incorporated into the Kensington Museum of Science (London) and this mirrors my own high regard for this unique repository of original artefacts. After deciding which sites in the UK deserve your attention when next travelling, you can read about sights of interest in France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Holland, Sweden, USA, and Canada. For a decade Paul Decelles at Johnson County Community College, Kansas, has been compiling his own online text book. I arrived there by locating some of the useful images of biological molecules that Decelles has generated. The site given is a home page with a number of diversions that show Decelles as a passionate teacher with wide interests in biology. In a panel to the left you will find, among other choices, The Virtually Biology Course, Featured Sites, Recent Picks and the Evolution Education Ring. Moving on to The Virtually Biology Course you can choose from sections titled Basic Chemistry, Biochemistry, Metabolism, Photosynthesis, Cellular Respiration, Cell Reproduction/Life cycles, and an extensive section on genetics and DNA. The images that attracted me to the site have been created in a range of commonly used modelling programs (Chime and RasMol). You can look at Decelle's rendering of molecules including steroids, terpenes, fatty acids, phospholipids, carbohydrates, amino acids, nucleotides and nucleic acids. The explanatory text is basic, but may well suit the needs of beginning students. In going through Decelle's description of metabolism and photosynthesis you will find material that stands as a sound introduction and provides a lot of information in succinct style. However this is introductory content and will not suit more advanced students. The Biology Project challenges students by presenting questions to lead learning. Developed at the University of Arizona. The Biology Project has been tested on thousands of students. Teachers external to the project are invited to use The Biology Project to assign problems sets for reviews or cover topic in preparation for laboratory work. The authors claim that all students using the project will benefit from the real-life applications of biology and the inclusion of up-to-date research findings. Most of the illustrations and animations are original works created for the Biology project. Under the heading of Biochemistry you will encounter basic chemistry, metabolism, enzymes, energy, catalysis, large molecules, photosynthesis, pH and pKa, clinical correlates of pH, vitamin B12, folate, and regulation of carbohydrate metabolism. I started with pH because it is so central to many courses. The topic was divided into eleven sections: 1. Water as a solvent, 2. What is pH? 3. Physiological pH, 4. Calculating pH, 5. More pH calculations, 6. Relation between H+ and OH− concentration, 7. Neutralizing a basic solution, 8. Neutralizing an acidic solution, 9. pKa, 10. Relationship between pKa and pH and 11. pH and Buffering Capacity of a Mixed Solution. So, what is pH? Choice number 2 does not immediately tell you, rather it is a multiple choice question that (eventually) explains why the answer is minus log[H+]. Other questions have multiple correct answers so be careful to read the instructions for each question. Also note that each time a question is posed you can choose to do the tutorial on that issue before answering. This is an interesting way of letting some students declare that they are not fully familiar with a topic, while other students can progress without revising material that they know. The questions are not always easy even for a veteran teacher. For example, “Abnormal findings in patients with a vitamin B12 deficiency may include: A. methylmalonic aciduria, B. homocystinuria, C. megaloblastic anemia, D. hypersegmented nuclei in leucocytes, E. sensory neuropathy.” If the answer intrigues you then take the test and tutorial at the web site. Mary McCaskill, Langley NASA Research Center Virginia, has written this handbook to help people write correct scientific English. The challenge of getting English grammar correct is monumental for students and not entirely trivial for experienced writers. In compiling this list of websites I could not remember whether closing quotation marks precede or succeed a terminating full stop. It happens that I guessed incorrectly and needed to make six text replacements in the preceding material. This style guide advises that “Closing quotation marks always follow commas and periods, regardless of the context.” We all have pet dislikes in expression and one of mine is “gratuitous” use of quotation marks around perfectly sound words that have no need to be differentiated with quotes. I deliberately placed quotes around gratuitous just to illustrate such an inappropriate usage. McCaskill also points out that idiosyncratic usage of words normally only requires that they should be quoted the first time and not subsequently. The Handbook document is 108 pages long with an extensive index. The clear set out of McCaskill's Handbook with logical headings and dot points is itself an excellent example of clear writing, as you would expect. You can read it systematically or browse the examples. Good writing is something we demand of students and we also owe it to our students to set a good example. “It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong”—Richard Feynman. “The science of Psychiatry is now where the science of Medicine was before germs were discovered.”—Malcolm Rogers. “A scientist is happy, not in resting on his attainments but in the steady acquisition of fresh knowledge.”—Max Planck. “All models are wrong, but some are useful”.—George E. P. Box. “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”—Ernest Rutherford. “Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.”—Albert Einstein. “Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification.” - Karl Popper. “The great tragedy of Science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”—Thomas Henry Huxley. “Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating ten more.”—George Bernard Shaw. “We've discovered the secret of life.”—Francis Crick, 28 February 1953. There are many more quotes at this web site awaiting your contemplation and adaptation to new contexts.