In a tradition that can be traced back to London in 1827-and more recently to The Rockefeller University in 1959-the Howard Hughes Medical Institute has presented Holiday Lectures on Science for the past three years. High schools in the Washington, DC, area (including suburban Maryland and Virginia) are invited to select science students to attend the lectures, which are held in the 200-seat auditorium of the Institute's conference center in Chevy Chase, Md.
In the first year, the lectures were videotaped for archival purposes. The second year, they were televised to area high schools as a dry run for this year's satellite broadcast of the lectures throughout the United States (including Alaska and Hawaii) and Canada. Approximately 8,000 high schools (the number includes some colleges and universities and a smattering of other organizations) registered to receive the satellite coordinates and a package of teaching materials. The lecturer was Tom Cech, who received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1989. Dr. Cech, a Hughes investigator at the University of Colorado, Boulder, delivered his four lectures under the title of The Double Life of RNA.
An additional 12,000 schools were reached when the lectures were rebroadcast in January by The Classroom Channel, the free educational service provided by Channel One, which sends daily 10-minute news shows and other programs to its subscriber schools throughout the United States. There was an overlap of some 2,000 between the two groups of schools.
The concept of lectures for young people originated in the now-famous talks given by Michael Faraday and entitled "The Christmas Courses of Lectures Adapted to a Juvenile Auditory." Faraday, who had no formal education beyond elementary school, became the director of the laboratory of the Royal Institution in London in 1825, which is where the Christmas talks were held. He was apparently a talented lecturer and fond of dramatic demonstrations.
The Rockefeller University has sponsored Christmas lectures for high school students since 1959. Dr. Alfred E. Mirsky, a biochemist and the librarian at the university, began the lectures, which were renamed in his honor following his death in 1974; Sonja Wohl Mirsky, his widow, provided an endowment to insure the lectures would be continued.
One of the Christmas lecturers was Purnell W. Choppin, a virologist and a member of the Rockefeller faculty for nearly 30 years. He enjoyed the experience immensely and soon after he became president of HHMI in 1987, he began thinking about a similar series for the DC area.
Dr. Choppin selects the Holiday lecturer (or lecturers) from among the 280 Hughes investigators around the country. The first lecturers were Stephen Burley and John Kuriyan, both of whom are HHMI investigators at Rockefeller University. In the second year, the Holiday lectures were delivered by Shirley Tilghman, an HHMI investigator at Princeton University, and Robert Nussbaum, a former HHMI investigator who is now at the National Institutes of Health.
Selection of a video production house required a lot of effort. First, we asked a consultant to recommend several local firms and ask them to submit statements of interest and qualifications. We selected five to interview, from whom we chose two to submit tentative budgets before being brought back for second interviews.
We ultimately decided on Sutherland Media Productions of DC Among their responsibilities were a marketing campaign and all
necessary interactions with the teachers who expressed interest in receiving the lectures; arranging satellite time; helping to prepare Dr. Cech's materials for television; creating the on-air package of introductions and transitions into and out of the lectures; planning and executing the broadcasts themselves; conducting the post-broadcast evaluation survey; and, finally, post-production editing of the lectures to create a set of videotapes suitable for further distribution to teachers.
Since it took us until May to make the selection, we were in a hurry from the very beginning. Marketing was complex. We had to locate and obtain mailing lists of teachers and media center directors (formerly known as librarians) so that we could send them announcements of the lectures' availability via satellite; just under 150,000 notices were mailed. In addition, we posted notices of the satellite lectures on various Internet locations and bought space ads in several publications.
Schools could respond to the notices by telephone, fax, or mail. To handle the several hundred telephone calls, an 800 number with a voice mail menu was created, and temporary help was hired to computerize and respond to the thousands of inquiries.
As the broadcast dates approached, we became aware that every cable system in the Washington, DC, area was going to carry the lectures. That realization spurred us to invite the general public to tune in to Dr. Cech. We took out quarter-page ads in The Washington Post and ran them twice in the three days before the lectures. (It isn't often that one reads a headline in a newspaper ad saying: DNA makes RNA makes protein.)
The lectures and the broadcasts went beautifully. It did not snow on December 18 and 19, so our studio audience showed up. Tom Cech likes to teach undergraduates and routinely does so at Boulder. He is a gifted teacher, and although the time and effort needed to prepare for the broadcast far exceeded what was expected, he retained a sense of humor. His final judgment was that the enormous audience that television provides made the extra effort worthwhile.
We do not know how many students actually watched the live presentations, but we are trying to find out. We are preparing to do a random survey of the schools that registered to receive the broadcasts to find out how they were used. Most schools also videotaped the broadcasts and were granted perpetual rights by the Institute to use them for educational purposes.
The costs are not insignificant. Satellite time, for example, was $34,000, which included both C band and Ku band; the costs doubled because we sent out a delayed signal to the West Coast, Hawaii, and Alaska. The total for the entire effort is expected to be in the neighborhood of $275,000.
We believe that broadcasting the lectures is a useful contribution to both science education and public understanding. There are inevitable dilemmas in such efforts, however. The question of the level of sophistication of the science to be presented is one. Another is trying to balance the needs of the studio audience with the demands of television.
But we will continue to broadcast the lectures, and by early February we had already held two planning meetings. Next year's lecturers have been selected: immunologists Philippa Marrack and John Kappler, HHMI investigators who work as a team at the National Jewish Center for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine in Denver.
We expect to have copies of the 1995 lecture videotapes by the end of March. Anyone who would like to have a set, just call. And if anyone is interested in undertaking a similar effort, we'd be happy to discuss the project in detail.
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Robert D. Potter is director of communications at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, 4000 Jones Bridge Rd, Chevy Chase, MD 20815-6789. He can be reached via email at potterr@hq.hhmi.org or tel: 301-215-8863. [Contributed to ScienceWriters February 1996.]