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Students must question the unknown to nurture interest in science
View(s):By Kumudini Hettiarachchi
Nobel Laureate Prof. Leland H. Hartwell speaks on science and education in keynote address at the inauguration of the International Research Conference (IRC) of the Kotelawala Defence University
Simple, succinct and eloquent, uplifting the mood amidst two days of showers, was the guidance all about science and education given by a Nobel Laureate recently.
Joining on Zoom from Arizona in the United States of America, with a backdrop of greenery and a serene waterway, it was a rare opportunity for Sri Lankans to hear Prof. Leland H. Hartwell speak about his work as well as how students should be nurtured in science young.
Prof. Leland Hartwell joining online and Dr. Dharshan De Silva at the Q&A session
He was delivering the keynote address at the inauguration of the two-day 16th International Research Conference (IRC) of the General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University (KDU) and participating in a Q&A session the next day. The link up with Prof. Hartwell, currently teaching at the Arizona State University, had been facilitated by KDU’s Deputy Vice Chancellor (Defence & Administration), Brig. Chintaka Wickramasinghe, through Prof. Indika Rajapaksa of the University of Michigan, USA.
The other keynote address was by Central Bank Governor Dr. Nandalal Weerasinghe.
‘Achieving Resilience through Digitalization, Sustainability and Sectoral Transformation’ was the theme of the IRC organised by its Chair Dr. Aruna Dharshan De Silva who held the question-and-answer session with Prof. Hartwell which was chaired by Senior Professor Mirani Weerasooriya.
Prof. Hartwell stressed that it is “very important” to get students interested in science and they do that by asking their own
questions.
“Science is most interesting when we begin with a phenomenon like cell division and ask questions about it. How is it controlled? How is the accuracy maintained? In the past, education has largely been about providing students with information about what we already know. But science is not about what we know but what we don’t know. So I think it’s very important to engage students in asking questions about things that are still a mystery and how we might begin to tinker and plan experiments to try to answer our questions,” he said.
Currently, he has chosen to use as a subject sensory perception and cognition. This was largely because it does not require any fancy equipment, just a computer. “How do we see, how do we hear, how do we make sense of what we see and hear. How do we remember them? We are studying how we create stories and communicate stories to one another, which I think is the basis of science because stories are a series of causal events and science is interested in
causality.”
Keen to help in what many others are doing as well, he said it is important to introduce this kind of questioning – Enquiry Science – into much younger ages. He is engaging the middle school, usually where children decide whether they are interested in science or not and that’s around the ages 10-13 years.
He points out that the way to think about the unknown is by starting with the known. So we need a definition of the known. Science has a very rigorous definition of the known – it’s what we can predict. The accuracy with which we can predict the future, is the way we evaluate our science.
Next Prof. Hartwell cites two “wonderful” examples – we are very good at predicting eclipses and that shows that planetary motion is part of our known. So we can now look at what phenomena exist as part of our unknown. Earthquakes are as dramatic as eclipses, but we cannot predict them. So they are part of the unknown. They are still a mystery and a subject of active science.
When asked by Dr. De Silva whether interest in science is waning, Prof. Hartwell was quick to respond with “I am not sure how are interests are changing. I think we are very interested in many of the problems facing the next generation – climate change, extinction of animals, various problems with food security. These are science problems as well”.
Social problems are science problems, he said, pointing out that human behaviour is largely unknown and so we consider it part of the arts. But human behaviour is the cutting edge of the unknown in science that we need to apply ourselves to, if we are going to solve the problems that we face in the future.
The issue may not be so much the lack of interest in science but the lack of interest in the subjects that science has been preoccupied with in the past. The need is to become interested in the subjects that science needs to dedicate itself to in the future.
When asked by Dr. De Silva about his switch of interests from mathematics, physics and light mechanical drawing to biology, Prof. Hartwell said that it is very important for students to begin their university education very broadly, find those things that interest them and then find their major.
“Success in science or any field only comes if you are highly motivated and very interested in it. If you are locked in a subject that you are not, you are just not going to be successful. We need to give everyone the opportunity to change their interests and go where their interests are leading them and making them motivated,” he added.
| The study that won him the Nobel prize Prof. Leland H. Hartwell, who turns 84 on October 30, along with Tim Hunt and Sir Paul Nurse won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001 “for discoveries of key regulators of the cell cycle”. The Nobel Prize website states: “From the beginning, organisms evolve from one cell, which divides and becomes new cells that in turn divide. Eventually different types of cells are formed with different roles. For an organism to function and develop normally, cell division has to occur at a suitable pace. Leland Hartwell has helped to show how the cell cycle is controlled. Through studies of yeast in 1971, Hartwell was able to identify hundreds of genes that govern cell division. He also showed that the cell cycle comes to a halt if the cell’s DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is damaged.” Referring to the work that won the Nobel Prize, Prof. Hartwell says that cell division is very fundamental to all of biology. When they began this work, very little was understood about the components of the cell that controlled cell division. They were able to identify many genes that participated in controlling cell division by using yeast cells as they were like human cells and wonderful to do genetics with. They also reproduced very rapidly. For students interested in research careers, he says that what was wonderful about working with yeast was how rapidly one could do experiments – that made it really fun. “I recommend that those doing science consider the turnaround time – how long it takes to plan an experiment, do it and get a result. The shorter that is the more fun it is.” When asked to detail how his findings over 20 years ago are still applicable with regard to the development of anti-cancer drugs, Prof. Hartwell said that many of them, what people call targeted drugs, are against proteins that participate in different steps of the cell cycle. “We didn’t discover all of those. But the methods were useful for many people who identified many proteins that are being targeted for cancer patients. Interesting is that cancer is a disease of the cell cycle – cells make mutations and we arrange chromosomes and become very rapidly evolving. That’s at the basis of cancer,” he says, adding that understanding how the cells control the cycle and how it assures the accuracy of the cell cycle is also fundamental to understanding the basic aspects of cancer. | |
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