Teach students to critically read and interpret scientific papers, to write clearly, and to think creatively.
Students will write abstracts of their first rotation project, and each will be edited by teams of other students and by the instructor, and then revised. At the end of the first rotation, students will give short oral presentations. Selected classic papers that address key concepts will be read, discussed and critiqued. Classic is loosely defined and does not necessarily mean old. Students will write abstracts and discussion sections of selected papers. Students will write a review of a paper. Some weeks we will compare and contrast recently published '"back-to-back" papers. (example: 3 papers on micro-RNAs in Science, fall 2001). One week we will brainstorm about an unanswered question (examples: how does a cell know how big it is? how does a cell know who it is?) and then design experiments to test our models. We will attend departmental seminars and read a relevant paper of the speaker, and then discuss the presentation. One week will be devoted to discussing/debating an aspect of scientific ethics (authorship issues, sharing projects, etc.), using scenarios available on the web.
Platt, J.R. (1964). Strong inference. Science 146: 347-353.
Chamberlin, T.C. (1890). The method of multiple working hypotheses (reprinted in Science 148: 754-759).
Paulovitch, A. (1993). Creativity and graduate education. Mol. Biol. Cell 4: 565-568.
Additional readings will include selections from:
Alley, The Craft of Scientific Writing
Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Williams, Style: Towards Clarity and Grace
Zeiger, Essentials of Writing Biomedical Research Papers
Examples of classic papers:
Rastinejad and Blau (1993). Genetic complementation reveals a novel regulatory role for 3’ untranslated regions in growth and differentiation. Cell 72: 903-917.