Opinion column in Whitehead
Institute’s Paradigm magazine, Spring 2007
My daughter is studying biology
in high school, and her experience is both amazingly like and amazingly unlike
mine at her age.
The amazingly unlike part isn’t
hard to figure out. My old biology textbook doesn’t mention recombinant DNA,
which had barely been invented. My daughter lives in a world in which the human
genome has always been sequenced, sheep have always been cloned, and a certain
number of your friends have entered this world via in vitro fertilization.
What’s amazingly like is
how she’s learning: teacher, textbook and a little time in the lab. Oh, her
biology teacher is fond of educational websites, but those aren’t terribly
important in class (yet).
However dramatically medicine has
changed in my lifetime, that’s nothing compared to what she’ll see. As both a
medical consumer and citizen, she’ll need to understand the strengths and
limitations of the major advances now lurking just over the horizon.
But I don’t think she’ll spend
much time reading about them in print.
We still get print newspapers,
news magazines and science publications delivered at home. My daughter rarely
reads any of them.
What she does, like her friends
(and her parents), is spend time on the Web. Lots of time. The Web
will be her main channel for tracking the future of biomedicine, as it will be
for so many other topics.
And when she can, she’ll be
watching videos on the Web.
For years, Whitehead has been
filming our principal investigators as they give lectures to our non-scientific
staff, and posting those films in our Web gallery.
But, as everyone knows, the
popularity of Web videos is soaring now with the combination of powerful PCs,
fast Internet connections, inexpensive digital video hardware and software, and
Web video aggregators.
That’s excellent news for public
understanding of biology. Along with the extraordinary power and promise of
today’s research comes extraordinary complexity. The popularity of Web videos
gives us new ways to dive through all those details to learn about today’s
biomedical research.
Enjoy an animation of proteins
doing their dances together, and suddenly you understand the basic concept.
Watch a researcher explain what her lab studies, and it becomes clear. Show
students a postdoc describing how he got excited about his field, and you can
inspire them too.
What’s really new is that people
don’t have to wander across your Web site to find this great stuff. Today, for
instance, YouTube’s most famous science video shows the startling results of
dropping a Mentos mint into a bottle of Diet Coke. But the video aggregation
website also is becoming a major resource for high school teachers swapping
classroom videos.
So we at Whitehead and our
colleagues at other research institutions will be expanding our use of video,
along with podcasts and other Web goodies. It’s another way for our scientists
to tell their stories—and sometimes, my daughter and her peers will tune in.