November 8th, 2018
By Tyler Reagle
PREFACE: Being ever the pompous
windbag that a STEM education often cultivates (in addition to other beneficial
qualities), I had originally intended on writing a dense and moving piece about
novel drug-delivery methods utilizing ultrasound and electromagnetic radiation.
The topic excited me enough to plan a post that discussed some of the latest
trends in this biomedical discipline, some recent innovations, and discussion
of why it is valuable research. However, when I navigated back to ScienceDaily
to refer to the article that originally spurred my interest, I became
distracted by a more important article that caused me to scrap these
pre-existing plans.
A quality STEM education is
invaluable for inspiring young people to pursue careers in science and/or
develop a basic understanding. Even for those who lack this desire later in
life, the mass-hysteria surrounding GMOs and Chemophobia (a term I am increasingly
finding cliché and trite at this point in the semester) provides a growing need
to decrease the fears of pharmaceuticals, nucleic acids, and all the gamut that
chemists and biochemists interact with daily with minimal terror.
Serving to address this issue,
collaboration between the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering
at Harvard, MIT, and Northwestern University has created BioBits- pre-packaged,
freeze-dried toolkits containing all the necessary enzymes and substrates for
exciting, age-appropriate synthetic biology experiments for K-12 classrooms. Interestingly,
the kits do not contain any cells and, instead, provide young students with
hands-on experience with the molecular basis of life inspiring courage in the
face of these biomolecules that scare so much of the older population.
As Ally Hung, a co-first author
of two publications outlining the implementation of BioBits, explained to
ScienceDaily, “the main motivation in developing these kits was to give
students fun activities that allow them to actually see, smell, and touch the outcomes
of the biological reactions they're doing at the molecular level.” Some
examples of the experiments contained in BioBits include genetic expression of
an enzyme that produces isoamyl acetate (a compound granting bananas their
scent), use of the sortase enzyme to make their own peptide-based Silly Putty
(similar to the growing focus of peptide-based gels for biomaterial engineering
conducted by actual-factual chemical biologists!), and the expression of
fluorescent proteins from immobilized RNA-hairpin ‘unlocking’ from base-pairing
with complementary fruit DNA (having remarkable similarity to some bioassays
performed, also, by actual-factual chemists/biochemists). These experiments
link the unseen biochemical world to fun, large-scale changes that students are
able to interact with in a positive light. In turn, BioBits discourages future fearmongering
against recombinant organisms while, in addition, illustrating to students the
key scientific principle of anchoring microscopic conclusions to macroscopic
observation. So far, there has been good reception to BioBits, and, with their
low costs, it is realistic that these kits can be easily proliferated worldwide
to provide students with relevant, contemporary STEM education.
While BioBits obviously hold
great potential for reducing societal misconceptions regarding biochemical
research (at least once these future scientists, policy-makers, and other
individuals are old enough!), the discovery of this article reminded me of the
child-like wonder that scientific research and learning instills within myself
and, certainly, others who study/work in our discipline. I am reminded that despite
scientific discovery being decorated with jargon and elitism that impedes/scares
the surrounding world from learning more about chemical discovery, it must be
our job to make the beneficial lessons more tractable and less threatening.
BioBits is a major contributor to this effort but, certainly, more can be done.
References:
You post on an interesting and very important topic. The addition of biobits to k-12 education is just what is needed to instill not only scientific literacy but enthusiasm for science. You chose good examples and explain them well. I think the post would encourage teachers to give the technology a try. It could be a little more concise. I wouldn't omit the basic science, but your introduction and some of your discussion could be a bit more concise. Good post.
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