Commentary:Have We Received the Wakeup Call?

摘要

A few months ago,in a commentary in Cell,Dr.Bruce Alberts issued what he called A Wakeup Call for Science Faculty [1].In this thought-provoking piece,he challenged us as teachers of basic sciences to change the way we teach the introductory science courses in our colleges and universities.There are far too many introductory survey courses in our institutions that fill the students with "...the most important facts that our own particular discipline has discovered about the natural world,without conveying to them how we came to know and understand these facts."[1]This approach is patently insufficient in a world of sequenced genomes and the nearly exponential increase in our understanding of everything from macromo-lecular interactions to the developmental biology of entire organisms.The "information dump"approach has resulted in too many of our students choosing fields other than science for their studies,a generation of science teachers who are poorly schooled in the methods and concepts of scientific discovery,and a public that is so mistrusting of scientific discovery that they are willing to believe that from time to time living things fail to obey the laws of chemistry and physics and are molded by such things as "intelligent design."It is now time to listen to this "wakeup call"and decide how we as biochemists and molecular biologists can help solve this critical problem.Our first task is to listen to the "call"and then enter a discussion about how to meet the enormous challenges of education not only for our future scientists but also for a workforce at many levels and for a public that is increasingly skeptical about and alienated from modern science.