Science Education Shouldn't Be Restricted To Narrow Boxes

The face of science has altered significantly within the past 30 years, and education has not kept up. If universities and medical schools continue to create new scientists from the old mold, thousands of new biologists, chemists, physicists, and doctors will venture into new laboratories unprepared for necessary interdisciplinary involvement. They need this preparation now to meet medical and technological challenges, such as curing AIDS, creating nuclear fusion, and finding environmentally sound ways to dispose of waste. However, while scientists now face critical problems in health and environmental research that can be solved only by innovative, unified approaches, educators still teach science within tightly drawn disciplinary boundaries. The amount of information generated daily in a field such as cancer research is now daunting. It comes from many disciplines in both the laboratory-based basic sciences, such as biochemistry and molecular biology, and the patient-based medical specialties, such as pathology and medicine. A cancer researcher who must digest this overwhelming amount of information needs a broad- based education and laboratory training, the ability to obtain research results in both clinical and academic settings, and new ways of organizing information. Likewise, cures and solutions rarely fit into disciplinary boundaries. They are increasingly found by bringing together physicians and basic scientists, and combining disciplines-- drawing upon, for example, information and techniques from engineering or chemistry. Unfortunately, much of our science teaching is still rooted in the classical method, under which information has been pre- organized in discrete disciplines for the students. With this classical method--especially at the undergraduate level, when young scientists begin to establish lifelong habits--students are not encouraged to integrate their knowledge by solving problems requiring input from several fields at once. It has been clear to clinicians for a long time that their traditional focus on organ systems and physiology would not be enough to solve the cancer riddle. Recognizing this, the National Institutes of Health began 20 years ago to direct some of its programs and its own training base toward erasing these boundaries between the basic sciences and medicine. This encouraged physicians with patient experience to, at the least, compare notes with and, at the most, to collaborate with laboratory researchers. Moreover, NIH's effort to lower the barrier between the basic sciences and medicine assisted scientists in sharing tools: Physicians in the lab got access to molecular imaging systems, and chemists working on cancer, to human tissue. This cross- fertilization took place without eradicating the need for the disciplines, which provide the structural approach to a problem and a shared base of knowledge. Yet education lags. On the undergraduate level, colleges still persist in narrow majors, declared as early as possible, with no encouragement for a student to draw upon other fields for work in a particular discipline. Premeds are steered as quickly as possible into a closed circle; nonmajors are frozen with an immediate immersion in the memorization of various tables, rarely experiencing the lab-based solving of problems that is the excitement of science. On the graduate level, once the students have achieved a solid grounding in several areas and have singled out a field of specialization, they begin to experience time constraints in keeping up with more than their own discipline. Thus, as graduate students, they may lack the support for thinking in broad terms and making the far-reaching connections that often result in the innovative solutions that solve our deepest puzzles. To change this education, we must overcome resistance in universities and medical schools to "open-border" policies, and the intransigence of old methods and old "flow charts" for laboratories and faculty. Just as researchers found themselves having to get out of their boxes in order to solve challenges, our method as educators should be to give students at every level problems whose solutions require interdisciplinary investigation. Through this we can develop curricula to keep pace with the changing face of science. We must develop a paradigm, first of all, that stresses fundamental education in the sciences across departmental lines. And we should move away from the rote memorization of the classical method--for both science and non-science majors. Much like asking beginning auto mechanics to spend a year memorizing the timing gaps for each auto make and model instead of teaching them about engines, we ask our beginning students to prepare for practical experience through months of memorization without apparent utility. A watered-down version of technical preparation doesn't offer an adequate introduction to the sciences. Instead, we can offer students problems to solve that require their obtaining critical scientific tools--in ways that ignore departmental boundaries. If we pose that they have just been diagnosed with colon cancer and must decide among treatments, they will learn to answer the following questions: What are the rates of cure (needed: math and probability)? How does the disease typically develop (needed: molecular biology, pathology)? How will the body's battle effect changes on other organs and physiological systems (needed: physiology, biochemistry)? What other information is needed to make this decision, and where can it be found? Or they can be taught about genetics and the Human Genome Project (a cross-disciplinary endeavor) by learning to isolate a precise piece of DNA, analyze it in a gel, and learn to read its sequences. Or they could be charged with developing a numerical solution, programmable on a PC, for representing a photograph or a microscopic image, and then test the solution's accuracy on the screen. Graduate students, for their part, can be encouraged to use the techniques of other disciplines to enhance their own work. An ecologist studying the effects of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill on the coastline fish population of Alaska may train in the techniques of molecular biology for determining population changes. There have always been creative scientists who ignored the edge between clinical and basic sciences, as well as among natural, physical and applied sciences; now we need to encourage our faculty and students in ways designed to make this a routine--and not an exceptional--practice. By building in fundamental exchanges, we will be educating both scientists and the general public on the vital and essential methods of understanding the world. Our challenges are to solve pressing health, environmental, and technological crises and, in the United States, to regain a leadership position for science through reform and innovation. Let's start with education. Alice S. Huang, a virologist, is the dean for science at New York University.

Science Education Shouldn't Be Restricted To Narrow Boxes

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