Lasker Awards

Stories

An Addiction to Education at All Levels

Bruce Alberts
I grew up long before the Internet, at a time when there was hardly anything of interest to watch on
our tiny black and white televisionin fact, the available TV channels would mostly display test
patterns. As a result, school was by far the most interesting activity in my life; in comparison, the
hot, humid summer vacation months, spent at home near Chicago without air conditioning,
seemed endlessly boring. Later, accumulating the 21 Boy Scout merit badges needed for Eagle
rank would fill my summers much more productivelya model that I have suggested schools
might use today, to allow students to get credit for deeply exploring a few of their individual
passions.
Why did I find school so interesting? In an era before Education Standards, my
public school teachers had been free to be creative, devoting an entire year to
Latin America, for example. I also distinctly remember writing a long report on
The Farm Problem in seventh grade, in which I was forced to answer a question
that I initially found incomprehensible: why was our government paying US
farmers for not growing a crop? The next year, I was assigned a class presentation
to explain how a television set works. And, in ninth grade, a highlight was grappling
with science books in the huge, overwhelming Chicago public library, in order to
write a report on how spectroscopy is used in chemistry.

We were assigned to
the same home room
to start the school day,
and by chance, mine
was a chemistry lab .

I was surprised to do so well in high school, and I especially loved chemistry. For each of the four
years, we were assigned to the same home room to start the school day, and by chance, mine
was a chemistry lab full of what are now considered hazardous materials. Sitting in a trough
Bruce Alberts engaging with budding scientists.

Cell 167, September 22, 2016 2016 Elsevier Inc. 1

Lasker Awards

Stories

Photo from New Trier High School, Winnetka, IL (1955).

each day in front of my seat at a lab bench were bottles of strong acids, bases, and pure
chemicalsmaking chemistry much more exciting than the abstractions in textbooks.
My inspiring home-room teacher, Carl Clader, eventually became chair of New Trier High Schools
Science Department; later, when serving as president of the US National Academy of Sciences, I
had the privilege of returning to help honor him in retirement.
I have always been quite disorganized; true to form, I signed up too late for my
oversubscribed high school biology class. In its place, I joined a very small class in
amateur radio. My first introduction to biology was thus as a Harvard freshman. The
first semester of the Harvard Course was tedious. It was taught by a botanist who
believed in vitalismthe claim that living organisms cannot be explained by the
normal laws of physics and chemistry, and I can remember almost nothing from that
class. But then, boom!in the second semester, we were assigned and examined
on a new textbook just published in January 1957: Principles of Zoology by John
A. Moore, then a 42-year-old professor at Columbia. This beautifully written book
explained, in a highly conceptual way, how our understanding of heredity had
developed step by step through careful experiments, quoting from original papers
and reprinting original figures. It was the most exciting science book that I had ever
read (much later, I was able to make a 1972 edition freely available on the web at
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/13199/heredity-and-development-second-edition).
Then, in 19591960, an insanely (and serendipitously) successful senior thesis
research project, carried out with my tutor Jacques Fresco in Paul Dotys laboratory,
committed me to a life of science.

I learned that one

should always make
students struggle with a
problem that was solved
by a scientific discovery,
coming up with their
own possible answers,
before telling them the
answer that science
provides.

Skip ahead about 25 years, and I am a professor of biochemistry at University of California, San
Francisco (UCSF) with three children in the San Francisco Public Schools. After many years as an
active school volunteer, my wife Betty had become the president of the San Francisco Parent
Teacher Association (PTA). Recruited to listen to her speak on the radio nearly every two weeks at
the evening school board meetings, I suddenly became aware of the vast mismatch between my
well-supported institution, UCSF, and the science teachers in a very needy public school district,
San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). This led to a meeting with a small group of
outstanding science teachers, who were asked how our university might help: the result was a
vigorous, bottom-up partnership between SFUSD teachers and the faculty and young scientists at
UCSF that is now in its 30th year (http://biochemistry2.ucsf.edu/programs/sep/).
Ever since that time I have been deeply impressed by my interactions with large numbers of
outstanding, dedicated science and math teachers at the precollege level. I have incredible
respect for the difficulty of their jobs, and I am amazed by their skill, stamina, and dedication. And I
have learned a tremendous amount from them about how to teach science. For example, I learned
that one should always make students struggle with a problem that was solved by a scientific
discovery, coming up with their own possible answers, before telling them the answer that science
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Stories

Bruce Alberts, ca. 1987, donning a copy of Molecular Biology of the Cell, the essential reference text for cell
biology.

provides. Classroom research with long-term follow up reveals that students are likely to retain the
understandings that they obtain in this way a year later; in contrast, scientific facts that are merely
told to students and memorized for an exam tend to be quickly forgotten. This principle forms the
basis for the truism that, for science teaching, less is morein opposition to the all-to-common
insistence on maximum coverage of each subject. Sadly, the emphasis on coverage remains
dominant in US classrooms today, leading to biology textbooks for 12 year olds with 500-word
glossaries. Such textbooks would drive anyone, including me at that age, away from science
and I claim that they are among the most difficult books to actually understand of any ever written
(https://brucealberts.ucsf.edu/publications/Failureofskin.pdf).
My daughter is now a science teacher in a public school system, resuming a
It is a monumental
career that had been interrupted by raising three children. During this long leave
mistake to allow
of absence, and disturbed that her second grade child had thus far not been
exposed to any science in school, she volunteered to help. She began her first
students to conclude
science lesson by giving the children samples of three different types of soil,
that being educated
equipping each with a magnifying glass and asking them to write down what they
observed in each sample. But she was surprised to find that the children seemed
means knowing all of the
paralyzed, being unwilling to write anything. Why? It turned out that, after three
right answers.
years of schooling, these students were afraid to respond because they didnt
know the right answer. Life is nothing like a quiz show, and it is a monumental
mistake to allow students to conclude that being educated means knowing all of the right
answers. Is it any wonder that nearly half of U.S. middle- and high-school students are found to be
disengaged from their schooling?
From teachers, I have also learned a great deal about the great damage that is being done by the
top-down, compliance culture that dominates US public school system management today. As
a scientist, I have struggled to find a strategy for beginning to change that culture, finally settling
on a campaign to empower our best teachers in ways that can give them an effective voice
in school district policymaking (https://brucealberts.ucsf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/
Alberts-from-Past-as-Prologue-NAEd-50th-book.pdf). And I have long been intensely devoted to
the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP), a non-profit organization that originated
from studies by the National Academies; since 2003, SERP has been experimenting with ways to
generate effective education research on the central problems of schooling, as defined by school
districts themselves (serpinstitute.org).
Cell 167, September 22, 2016 3

Lasker Awards

Stories

Meeting with science students in Indonesia, 2011.

From the seminal 1989 publication from the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, Science for All Americans, I first became aware that science education is much
more important for societies than even most scientists think. This is because, to quote that text,
Scientific habits of mind can help people in every walk of life to deal sensibly with problems that
often involve evidence, quantitative considerations, logical arguments, and uncertainty; without
the ability to think critically and independently, citizens are easy prey to dogmatists, flimflam
artists, and purveyors of simple solutions to complex problems. And in New Delhi in 1993, at the
first-ever meeting of the presidents of the worlds science academies, it became strikingly obvious
to me that the entire world badly needs much more of the creativity, rationality, openness, and
tolerance that are inherent to sciencewhat Indias first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru had so
aptly termed a scientific temper. As Nehru wrote in his 1946 book, The Discovery of India: the
scientific approach, the adventurous and yet critical temper of science, the search for truth and
new knowledge, the refusal to accept anything without testing and trial, the capacity to
change previous conclusions in the face of new evidence, the reliance on observed fact and not on
pre-conceived theory, the hard discipline of the mindall this is necessary, not merely for the
application of science but for life itself and the solution of its many problems.
In my first two years as the National Academy of Sciences president (19931995), I devoted an
enormous amount of time to producing the first-ever National Science Education Standards for
the United States. From that massive effort, I became convinced that introducing high-quality
inquiry-based science education (IBSE) at all levels, from age five through college, provides the
best opportunity for developing the scientific temper that is so critical for every nation. The
establishment of the InterAcademy Panel in 1993, currently an association of science academies
from more than 100 nations, enables dedicated scientists from around the globe to share strategies and curricula, helping them work productively to spreading this form of active, inquirybased science learning in many nations (http://www.interacademies.net/File.aspx?id=8512).
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From these and other experiences, it has become clear to me that a continuous input of energy
and attention from local scientists will forever be essential, if school districts and nations are to
shape science education in effective ways. Otherwise, as for chemical systems, education systems tend to regress to the free energy minimumwhich is either teaching no science at all or, in
my opinion equally terrible, teaching science as a set of words and phrases for students to
memorize and spit back on simple tests.
Last but not least, all of us who teach science at the college level need to face the hard fact that
our teaching sets the standard for science education at all lower levels. Thus, for example, if
professors only lecture to passive students, aiming to attain maximum coverage of the vast
subject of biology in their introductory biology classes, college teaching will remain the major
obstacle in the path of science education reform. Research carried out in the past few decades
conclusively demonstrates that active learning can be incorporated effectively into even large
lecture classes. As scientists, we can and we must do better (http://www.nap.edu/catalog/18687/
reaching-students-what-research-says-about-effective-instruction-in-undergraduate).

Cell 167, September 22, 2016 5