Objectives: Teach students to critically read and interpret scientific papers, to write clearly, and to think creatively.
Description
Students will write abstracts of their first rotation project, and each will be edited by teams of other students and by the instructor, and then revised. At the end of the first rotation, students will give short oral presentations. Selected classic papers that address key concepts will be read, discussed and critiqued. Classic is loosely defined and does not necessarily mean old. Students will write abstracts and discussion sections of selected papers. Students will write a review of a paper.
Some weeks we will compare and contrast recently published"back-to-back" papers. (recent example: 3 papers on micro-RNAs inScience, fall 2001). One week we will brainstorm about an unansweredquestion (recent examples: how does a cell know how big it is? how doesa cell know who it is?) and then design experiments to test our models. We will attend departmental seminars and read a relevant paper of thespeaker, and then discuss the presentation. One week will devoted todiscussing/debating an aspect of scientific ethics (authorship issues, sharing projects, etc.), using scenarios available on the web.
List of readings
Platt, J.R. (1964). Strong inference. Science 146: 347-353.
Chamberlin, T.C. (1890). The method of multiple working hypotheses (reprinted in Science 148: 754-759).
Paulovitch, A. (1993). Creativity and Graduate Education. Mol. Biol. Cell 4: 565-568.
Additional readings will include selections from:
Alley, The Craft of Scientific Writing
Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.
Williams, Style: Towards Clarity and Grace
Zieger, Essentials of Writing Biomedical Research Papers.
Examples of classic papers:
Kirk et al. (1993). The relationship between cell size and cell fate in Volvox carteri. J. Cell Biol. 123: 191-208.
Rastinejad and Blau (1993). Genetic complementation reveals a novel regulatory role for 3’ untranslated regions in growth and differentiation. Cell 72: 903-917.