Fast FAQs: Learning about life

What do university students need to know about biology?

Whitehead Member Hazel Sive, who was appointed associated dean of MIT's School of Science this summer, considers how we teach life sciences now—and what's coming.

How is the teaching of biology changing?

Whitehead Member Hazel Sive, who was appointed associate dean of MIT’s School of Science this summer, considers how we teach life sciences now— and what’s coming. Photo: Furnald/Gray

What has really emerged in the last twenty years is the sense that biology isn’t an isolated subject. That’s certainly been recognized since the dawn of molecular biology in the ’40s and the ’50s, but that sense really did not permeate biology education for a while. And what’s happened, and what’s happening, is that the connection between biology and the other disciplines has become very strong. Biology has permeated every other topic at MIT.

There are very strong intellectual bridges, research bridges and teaching bridges built between biology and other departments. This is a trend that only will strengthen.

In the future, you may not come to MIT to study biology per se. It may be that you will come here to study biophysics or biochemistry or bioethics. You will focus more on specific areas of biology because biology itself is so big.

How can you best teach such a vast and rapidly growing subject?

That’s an interesting question. We teach one semester of introductory biology, and what I do in my course is get rid of all history. There’s what we know, and what we’re trying to know, and what the current challenges are.

Why should every MIT student learn about biology?

There are a few good reasons that biology is a general Institute requirement.

One is that the current estimate is that 40 percent of all MIT research is biology-based. So the students who sit in my class need the background.

And I’ll make a prediction that 70 percent of our students will, at some point, do something in their careers that touches on biology, no matter what major they take.

Another part is that the moment they become MIT students they are spokespeople for science, within their own families and within their own communities. People will ask them questions, and they need to be informed.

And then I always throw in for my students that this is really cool stuff, and this is about you. It’s fascinating to think that you came from a single cell.

What do undergraduates learn in the lab?

Eight-five percent of our students participate in lab research at some point during their three years as biology majors. Those students get training in how to design experiments, how to test hypotheses, how to think logically in a practical kind of way. It’s a very powerful program.

Students are strongly encouraged to stay in a lab for a minimum of two semesters, or a summer and a semester. We really encourage students to go deep into one lab rather than to get a smattering of how things work. The idea is to learn how to do research, and you can’t do that if you’re just sampling. We want them to get into the kitchen and figure out how to make the food on the table, not just arrange it on the plate and maybe eat some of it.

Are methods of teaching changing?

For me, the one-on-one conversation, without any electronic devices, except to augment information, is the heart of pedagogy, and I never want that to change.

The Internet clearly can, and has done, an enormous amount of good. It’s so easy to look something up now. It used to be so arduous. And that’s fantastic. It helps with my lectures; it lets my students get to know what’s out there.

But I’m a believer in using information to help thinking, not substituting information from the Internet.

I have a radical idea for MIT: we turn off the Internet for three hours a day. That would encourage our students, especially our undergraduates, to go back to old-fashioned mechanisms of communicating that involve conversations and sitting down and thinking things through in a quiet manner that is not intruded upon by music or flashing things or other input from the Internet.

Are we recruiting the right number of students to do biomedical research?

One does look at the huge number of buildings going up, and wonder where all those research scientists will come from, and what they’ll do, and who will fund them. On the other hand, there’s a lot of information that needs to be gathered, and we need people to gather it.