Inexpensive biology kits offer hands-on experience with DNA

Image: Felice Frankel

To help students gain a better grasp of biological concepts, MIT and Northwestern University researchers have designed new educational kits that can be used to perform experiments that produce glowing proteins, scents, or other easily observed phenomena, through the engineering of DNA.

Image: M. Scott Brauer

“Our vision is these kits will serve as a creative outlet for young individuals, and show them that biology can be a design platform,” says James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Biological Engineering

To help students gain a better grasp of biological concepts, MIT and Northwestern University researchers have designed new educational kits that can be used to perform experiments that produce glowing proteins, scents, or other easily observed phenomena, through the engineering of DNA.

Using freeze-dried, shelf-stable cellular components, students can learn about key biological concepts.

Biology teachers could use the BioBits kits to demonstrate key concepts such as how DNA is translated into proteins, or students could use them to design their own synthetic biology circuits, the researchers say.

“Our vision is that these kits will serve as a creative outlet for young individuals, and show them that biology can be a design platform,” says James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Biological Engineering. “The time is right for creating educational kits that could be utilized in classrooms or in the home, to introduce young folks as well as adults who want to be retrained in biotech, to the technologies that underpin synthetic biology and biotechnology.”

The new kits contain no living cells but instead consist of freeze-dried cellular components, which makes them inexpensive, shelf-stable, and accessible to any classroom, even in schools with minimal resources.

5 Ways to Make STEM More Exciting For Students

Image via Flickr by Maryam

For many students, the list of subjects included in STEM – science, technology, engineering and math ­– doesn’t inspire the same level of passion and interest as other subjects. This is a shame, because many STEM careers are lucrative and the industries they’re in just keep growing.

Almost half of students expressed an interest in STEM majors and occupations, including a healthy number of female students (46%). But that expressed interest hasn’t yet translated into a diversification in who’s getting jobs in STEM. In engineering, computer, and math sciences professions women still seriously lag behind men. And racial minorities don’t fare much better.

Many people have ideas about ways STEM can be discussed and taught to interest more of the student population. For the students who see less appeal in numbers and facts than stories and ideas, STEM subjects don’t have to seem dry and lifeless. So much of how students feel about STEM depends on how they learn about it.

5 Tips for More Exciting STEM Lessons

1) Incorporate Pop Culture

Use Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to talk about math and logic, or A Wrinkle in Time as a launching board to discuss physics. Or assign the popular podcast Star Talk, in which Neil Degrasse Tyson talks with (often famous) guests about the intersection between scientific inquiry and pop culture, taking on subjects like the science of superheroes and the zombie apocalypse.

Every year brings new big blockbusters that incorporate science and tech. What can students learn about space from Interstellar? (Google can help with that one.) Terminator can inspire a discussion about A.I., and Captain America can tie in to a lesson on the tech actually developed by the country during WWII.

Showing the role science and math play in stories and creativity can make all those students who think they only care about English and history realize that science actually has a lot going for it too.

2) Make it Relevant

For some students, the challenge of STEM is that it seems distant from the concerns of their everyday life. Brainstorm assignments that show them how they encounter STEM in their day-to-day. You could have students each research a tech advancement that saved lives or otherwise made the world better. The possibilities are seemingly endless:

• The crops scientists developed to help us avoid world hunger.
• The development of vaccines.
• The invention of running water.
• The rise in antibiotics.
• The importance of satellites to help us see extreme weather coming.

That’s just a starter list. This site that celebrates scientist lifesavers can help you generate a few more ideas.

For a less lofty way to show science’s relevance, you could tell your students to each pick an object they encounter every day and research what goes into making it. Your iPhone doesn’t work on magic, and all sorts of everyday objects contain some kind of chemicals or minerals people never think about.

3) Get a Debate Going

Most students are taught about concepts like negative numbers as though they’re the truth, plain and simple. In fact, they were controversial and different mathematicians made impassioned arguments for and against them over many years before they became largely accepted.

How much more interesting are negative numbers to you now than they were five minutes ago?

Debate makes subjects more engaging — specially a debate that students can get riled up about on both sides.

STEM subjects bring up ample opportunities for heated debates, such as:

• Should we fear A.I.?
• Should animals be given human rights?
• Was development of the nuclear bomb worth it?
• Is technology changing how our brains work for better or worse?
• Should money be spent going into space or helping people here on earth?

One way to get students really invested in researching a subject is to raise the stakes. Can your opinion (or the one you’re assigned to defend) stand up against someone else’s arguments?

4) Bring in Guest Experts

Whether you can get them to come into the classroom itself or instead set up a Skype call, people in STEM professions can clue students in to what those jobs look like day in and day out.

You get bonus points here for inviting successful people working in STEM fields that don’t look like the norm. Women and people of color making their mark on predominantly white and male professions will show your students that they don’t have to fit into a certain box to pursue those careers themselves. MIT has a series of videos on their website that show the experiences and insights of a diverse array of chemists. That’s the kind of thing that can help students of all types visualize themselves in a STEM career.

5) Let Student Passions Drive Their Assignments

No teacher needs to be told that every student is different. While it’s certainly not easy, working with individual students to come up with project ideas based on something they’re already passionate about can make for some real excitement.

A book lover could be assigned a seminal science fiction text and asked to do an assignment on the scientific issues explored in the book. A sports lover could be asked to analyze the math and physics behind the sport – how do angles, shapes, and distances play into creating the game they love? A photography enthusiast could be tasked with identifying and recording different plants and animals in her neighborhood.

A project that incorporates something they already love will feel more personal to each student than anything assigned to the whole class. It would give them an excuse to take ownership over their work and research in a way that will stick with them longer than many other assignments.

STEM doesn’t have to be a dry subject. Professionals and researchers are doing fascinating things in the STEM field every day. Students need a way to see that side of the story.

ORIGINAL: Edudemic

By Kristen Hicks 

April 6, 2015 @atxcopywriter

We Need to Stop Ignoring Women Scientists

Sawdust

You have never heard of Hertha Ayrton. She was a brilliant British engineer, physicist, and inventor at the turn of the 20th century, and if you knew who she was you would thank her for steadying the flicker then prevalent in movie projection systems (why they're still called flicks). But in her lifetime, Ayrton was also a prominent suffragist and an outspoken advocate for the acceptance of women in scientific fields. Ayrton wanted to make sure due recognition went to another brilliant physicist: her friend Marie Curie.

See? It worked. And now, 92 years after Ayrton's death and 81 years after Curie's, we can see the real problem with Ayrton's success. Because today if you ask someone to name a woman scientist, the first and only name they'll offer is Marie Curie. It's one of the biggest obstacles to better representation of women in science and technology, and it's time to cut it out. Stop talking about Marie Curie; she wouldn't have wanted things this way.

When Silvia Tomášková, director of the Women in Science program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, brings up famous female scientists with her students—and this has been happening since she started teaching 20 years ago—she gets the same reaction: “Marie Curie.” Tomášková always tries to move them on. “Let's not even start there. Who else?” What about Vera Rubin, who confirmed the existence of dark matter? The experimental physicist Chien-Shiung Wu? Hedy Lamarr, the Hollywood starlet who invented a communications technology that paved the way for Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth? 

Felix Petruska

But no. Rarely are they included on the “famous scientist” educational posters. (It's men and Curie.) You haven't heard their names any more than you have heard Ayrton's. Curie has a monopoly. 

 Don't get me wrong. Curie was a remarkable scientist. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize—and the only one to win it twice. From her discovery of radioactive elements polonium and radium whole new areas of research on radioactivity bloomed. Her work changed the world. But you already know this, of course. Curie occupies a well-worn card in our mental file system. She's our default setting, relied upon whenever a woman in science is needed. Yes, her work was groundbreaking, and yes, her life was fascinating, but name-checking her—and only her—is more than lazy. It's standing in the way of women pursuing STEM fields.

Although girls take the same number of math and science credits in high school that boys do—even earning slightly higher grades—only 21.5 percent of US women entering university plan on majoring in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. In computer science, women's share of the workforce has declined since the 1980s. Something happens in high school to convince girls that as young women they'd be out of place in science or math and should aim for less technical fields and lighter professions. To them Curie isn't a role model. She's a glaring, unattainable exception.

Our ability to make decisions extends only as far and wide as our knowledge base. When girls consider chemistry or archaeology, let's say, and find fields packed with men, it's hard for them to imagine that there's a stool for them at the lab bench too. According to both government reports and personal accounts, girls pursuing STEM careers benefit from role models. And they exist. They're just hidden behind everyone's favorite female scientist.

Related Stories

• Aaron Rowe:  Why Are Senior Female Scientists So Heavily Outnumbered by Men?
• Claudia Perlich: Women in Data Science Are Invisible. We Can Change That
• Caitlin Roper: This Woman Invented a Way to Run 30 Lab Tests on Only One Drop of Blood

If we really want to get more women into STEM fields, we need to enact a moratorium on Marie Curie. It's all well and good to have that obligatory female nerd in the lab on every procedural mystery TV show, to include some lab-coated ladies in a Lego set, or to add a computer engineer Barbie to Mattel's latest line (though that one didn't go so well). But clearly it's not enough. Every single one of us needs to scrub that you-know-who reflex from our brain and replace it with a diverse set of important female innovators. When we do, girls will gain Grace Hopper, who was one of the most important—and colorful—computer scientists in history; Marie Tharp, who mapped the ocean floor and saw evidence of continental drift years before her partner or others in the scientific community accepted the idea; Virginia Apgar, whose scoring system for newborns has saved countless babies' lives; and Inge Lehmann, who discovered Earth's inner core.

Hopper loved to remind people that “we've always done it this way” is a lousy excuse that stands in the way of progress. By challenging ourselves to talk about a wider variety of accomplished women in STEM fields, we're guaranteeing a future with an even greater selection of brilliant thinkers to champion.

Rachel Swaby (@rachelswaby) is the author of Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science—and the World, out April 7.

ORIGINAL: Wired

Rachel Swaby Magazine
04.01.15

Ainissa Ramirez on women in STEM

Ainissa Ramirez isn’t your ordinary scientist; she’s also an inventor, an author, a TED speaker, a TED-Ed educator, and a serious advocate for science education. She shares her story, how we can all do our part to make STEM more inclusive, why women are as naturally inclined toward STEM as men, and her dream scientific dinner party. 

Ainissa’s Story
I wanted to be a scientist since I was 4. It is strange to write that; what is even stranger is that I got the idea from television. There was a show on TV called 3-2-1 Contact that had an African American girl doing science. I was hooked. I saw my reflection, and the notion of being black and being a scientist were fused together. There were no scientists in my working-class neighborhood in Jersey City, NJ.

Being exposed to new people and new ideas gives you an opportunity to find out more about yourself, about what you like and what you don’t like. Seek out role models, and follow that path until a better one presents itself.

I was lucky too because my parents encouraged education and made it clear it was the only inheritance that we (my two younger brothers, Dave and Marc, and I) were going to get. One of the smartest moves my mom made was to pick us up at the library after school. School closed at 2:30pm, but she did not get off work until 5pm. She had to come up with a safe place for us to wait for her. Being around books makes you want to learn, and the library became our second home.

Girls and STEM: A Lost History

While researching my own TED Book called Save Our Science, I found out something fascinating: When it comes to STEM and girls, society suffers from amnesia. In the 21st century, we talk a lot about getting girls into science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), but in the 19th century, these classes were filled with girls. In fact, in the 1890s, 58 percent of STEM students were girls.

What I found in my research is, the reason why girls are not in STEM now is cultural, not due to their natural ability. So, why did girls get removed from STEM classes? A couple reasons: the home economics movement; the substitution of Classics courses for STEM classes, which were needed for college admissions; and, yes, gender discrimination. But it is important to let girls know that they once ruled STEM!

A More Hospitable World

Now, to succeed in STEM as a woman, you need a support system of friends, role models to give you pep talks, and an ability to work hard. The payoff is worth it! Using science, tech, and math, you have the tools to change the world and solve huge problems, like reduce pollution, advance medicine, improve communication, and increase global health. That is the message we should use. Who wouldn’t want to change the world for the better? By not tapping into all of our human capital, we all lose. Think of all the inventions and ideas that have been lost because students got dissuaded from studying them.

But we can fix this problem together. We can all do our part to make STEM hospitable to all kinds of people. Imagine peer-to-peer STEM mentoring groups that are established, institutionally supported and nurtured. Minorities, especially women and people of color, need to have a space of their own as well. It is a human issue.

A Science Dinner Party

If I were to have a dinner party with six scientists (alive or deceased), they would be Benjamin Banneker, Dmitry Mendeleev, Leonardo da Vinci, Rosalind Franklin, Thomas Edison and Sir Isaac Newton. As you might know already, Mendeleev created the periodic table; da Vinci was a Renaissance man who sculpted, painted, and invented; Edison ushered in the electric age; and Newton found universal laws of motion that can be applied to objects big and small (he’s also a new crush of mine, since I just co-wrote a book named after him called Newton’s Football). My other two guests may not be as well known, but their impact is massive.

Benjamin Banneker has been a hero of mine since I was a kid. He was an African American scientist, almanac author and a surveyor in colonial America. That alone would be a huge achievement, but he was also one of the people who mapped out and gridded a swampy region that became Washington, D.C., and he did this from his photographic memory when the plans for the city were taken. Sure, there may be some mythology to him, but what is no myth is that Banneker was a STEM superhero.

And Rosalind Franklin, physicist and crystallographer, was the first to photograph DNA. She had the expertise of determining how atoms arranged themselves from the dark and light patterns they created on photosensitive paper. This photo was critical in helping decipher the double helix-shape for which Watson and Crick got the Nobel Prize (and beat Linus Pauling). Had it not been for Rosalind, history would have been very different. Had she not succumbed to cancer at the young age of 37, she would have been on the Nobel Prize’s short list (they are not given posthumously). While this story ends on a somber note, what there is no denying is that Rosalind was a powerhouse—a STEM powerhouse. She could wrestle with the big boys and hold her own.

So, more important: What would we eat? I would make food that was science themed. There were be ceviche (a seafood dish, which is a yummy example of fermentation); liquid nitrogen ice cream for dessert (three states of matter all living together); great wine (fermentation again); homemade bread (chemistry at its finest); caramelized carrots (a Maillard, or chemical, reaction); and braised pot roast (another Maillard reaction). Good food and great conversation peppered with science. You cannot get better than that!

ORIGINAL: TEDEd

By Jessica Ruby 

18 September, 2013 //

Women Nobel Prize Winners: 16 Women Who Defied Odds To Win Science's Top Award (PHOTOS)

ORIGINAL: Huffington Post
By Adam Toobin

08/18/2013

Marie Sklodowska-Curie. Unknown photographer; Wikimedia Commons

Marie Curie, née Sklodowska — Physics 1903, Chemistry 1911

Marie Curie, née Sklodowska (1867-1934) became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize when she was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics along with her husband Pierre Curie and Antoine Henri Becquerel "for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure."

Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the first woman to win an unshared Nobel Prize in the sciences and the first woman to win two Nobel Prizes — an achievement that no woman has yet to duplicate — when she was awarded the 1911 Nobel Prize for Chemistry "in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements of radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element." 

Women make up a bit more than half of the world’s population, yet even in the most developed countries, men hold the lion's share of jobs in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. What's more, men take home most of the prestigious scientific awards. That includes the Nobel Prizes, widely considered the ultimate mark of scientific achievement. 

Of the 357 people awarded a Nobel in the science categories — Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, and Economic Sciences — only 16 have been women (see slideshow below).

What accounts for this discrepancy?

"This low representation is likely due to there unfortunately being very few women scientists in the first half of the 20th Century," Dr. Hannah Dougdale and Dr. Julia Schroeder, two researchers at the University of Sheffield who have studied barriers for women in the sciences, told The Huffington Post in an email.

Until the 1970s the number of women who received Nobel Prizes was roughly proportional to the number of women doing scientific research — a small group of women winning a small number of Nobels. But as the number of women in science has increased over the past 40 years, women Nobelists remain the exception, according to an article in Significance magazine by Stephanie Kovalchik, a statistician at the National Cancer Institute.

"The evidence suggests that, in the first half of the 20th Century, qualified women were struggling to enter the scientific profession but those who broke through were as valued as their male colleagues," Kovalchik wrote. Today, that may no longer be the case.

Mary Ann Liebert, the founder of the Rosalind Franklin Society, a group committed to securing Nobel nominations for women, told NPR that she thinks women who deserve prizes are often overlooked -- because nobody steps forward to nominate them.

"Men tend not to nominate them, and women don't nominate themselves," Liebert told NPR. "Women scientists have to be more assertive in seeking nominations. I think that's a major issue. And I think men have to put women's names into nomination, too."

Dugdale and Schroeder also found that women appear as invited speakers at conferences less often than men, leading them to conclude that "low visibility of high-quality female scientists potentially means that their work does not attract the attention that it deserves, and importantly it has the effect that scientists and students are exposed to fewer female role models."

Check out our list below of the 16 women who have won a Nobel Prize in science.

Women Nobel Prize Laureates in the Sciences

Iréne Joliot-Curie — Chemistry 1935. Iréne Joliot-Curie (1897-1956) was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with her husband Frédéric Joliot, "in recognition of their synthesis of new radioactive elements." Joliot-Curie was the daughter of two-time Nobel Prize laureate Marie Curie née Sklodowska and Nobel Prize laureate Pierre Curie.

Gerty Cori, née Radnitz — Physiology or Medicine 1947. Gerty Cori, née Radnitz was awarded one half of the 1947 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with her husband Carl Ferdinand Cori "for their discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen." The other half of the prize went to Bernando Alberto Houssay "for his discovery of the part played by the hormone of the anterior pituitary lobe in the metabolism of sugar."

Maria Goeppert Mayer - Physics 1963. Maria Goeppert Mayer (1906-1972) shared half of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics with J. Hans D. Jensen, "for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure." Eugene Paul Wigner received the other half of the prize "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles."

Dorothy Hodgkin — Chemistry 1964. Dorothy Hodgkin (1910-1994) was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry " for her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances."

Rosalyn Yalow — Physiology or Medicine 1977. Rosalyn Yalow (1921-2011) was awarded one half of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for the development of radioimmunoassays of peptide hormones." Andrew Schally and Roger Guillemin split the other half of the prize "for their discoveries concerning the peptide hormone production of the brain."

Barbara McClintock — Physiology or Medicine 1977. Barbara McClintock (b.1902) was awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for her discovery of mobile genetic elements." McClintock is the only woman to win an unshared Nobel Prize in the field of Physiology or Medicine.

Rita Levi-Montalcini — Physiology or Medicine 1986. Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909-2012) was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Stanley Cohen "for their discoveries of growth factors."

Gertrude Elion — Physiology or Medicine 1988. Gertrude Elion (1918-1999) was awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Sir James Black and George Hitchings "for their discoveries of important principles for drug treatment."

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard — Physiology or Medicine 1995. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (b.1942) was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Edward Lewis and Eric Wieschaus "for their discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development."

Linda Buck — Physiology or Medicine 2004. Linda Buck (b. 1947) was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Richard Axel "for their discoveries of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system."

Françoise Barre-Sinoussi — Physiology or Medicine 2008. Françoise Barre-Sinoussi was awarded half of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Luc Montagnier "for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus." Harald zur Hausen won the other half of the prize "for his discovery of human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer."

Elizabeth Blackburn — Physiology or Medicine 2009. Elizabeth Blackburn (b.1948) was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Carol Greider and Jack Szostak "for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase." The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was the first Noble Prize in the sciences awarded to more than one woman. The year 2009 was also the first time more than one woman was awarded a Nobel Prize in the sciences -- Blackburn shared the Physiology or Medicine prize with Carol Greider, Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, and Ada Yonath won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Carol Greider — Physiology or Medicine 2009. Carol Greider (b.1961) was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack Szostak "for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase." The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was the first Noble Prize in the sciences awarded to more than one woman. The year 2009 was also the first time more than one woman was awarded a Nobel Prize in the sciences -- Greider shared the Physiology or Medicine prize with Elizabeth Blackburn, Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, and Ada Yonath won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Elinor Ostrom — Economic Sciences 2009. Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012) was awarded one half of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences "for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons." Oliver Williamson won the other half of the prize "for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm." The year 2009 was also the first time more than one woman was awarded a Nobel Prize in the sciences. Other female prize winners that year were: Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider for Physiology or Medicine, and Ada Yonath for Chemistry.

Ada Yonath — Chemistry 2009. Ada Yonath (b. 1939) was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome." The year 2009 was also the first time more than one woman was awarded a Nobel Prize in the sciences. Other female prize winners that year were: Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider for Physiology or Medicine, and Elinor Ostrom for Economic Sciences.