[rousing music]
[Cathy Drennan] So taking biology is so important right now.
We have all these problems facing the world and we need biology to solve them.
We're talking about what happens to our planet, what happens to people,
what happens to living things as the temperature change.
[Eric Lander] Biology, every week it's getting invented and we get to talk about current events.
[Drennan] In your body, bacteria outnumber
your own cells 10 to 1.
Who is in control?
[Maddy Kline] I learned a lot about sort of
where the field is at and what are some of
the current problems.
And one of them, I've gotten really interested in since then is antibiotic resistance and
antimicrobial resistance in general.
[Drennan] Some of the factors leading to this, are really kind of a lack of creativity on
people's parts in terms of thinking about
targets for their antibiotics.
[Alice Zhou] We talked about CRISPR which I had not heard of before coming to MIT.
[Lander] Not very long ago a scientist announced
that he had edited two babies and we talked
about the entire controversy.
Should he have done it, should it ever be
done.
[Alex Evenchik] It pushed us, and something I hadn't seen before, to be critical of science.
As opposed to just reading like the newest article or the newest paper
and being like okay, that makes sense.
[Drennan] How is resistance actually occurring?
What is happening at the molecular level, that is leading to these problems?
I do feel that one of the really important
reasons why everyone should take biology is
because there is a way of thinking in biology.
There's a way of looking at evidence.
There's a way of trying to piece together
what, what can we say for sure?
Is this just some associated effects or is
one thing causing something else?
[Maddie Kline] It's very based in problem
solving and critical thinking.
And you learn to really think through the
problems
and it's very rarely centered around memorization.
[Evenchik] My class was very question driven.
[Andrea Orji] It put me at ease more because
I was like, okay, I don't need to remember
that information from like three years ago.
That's not really relevant now.
I just need to understand how to like actually
figure out these problems as I'm presented
with them, in like a timely manner.
[Bolu Watife] It was definitely the class
that I had to push the most in.
They would give you a problem and then from
that problem you should start like remembering
different like parts of the lecture that kind
of fits into solving the problem.
And I think the challenge was probably really
healthy at least early in my MIT journey.
[Zhou] Everything is taught kind of along
the cutting edge of the field here.
Um, and you get to hear from professors who
are doing research, um, who get Nobel prizes
and other medals in science.
And I think the curriculum really reflects
that.
[Lander] It's a set of tools that work for
any living thing on the planet and they are
very powerful and very general.
You may not go into biology as a career,
but the odds are very good that whatever you
do in the next 50 years, biology will be an
important part of it.
[Zhou] This summer I was working, um, in business, but I actually managed to use some of my cell
biology knowledge talking to my client
who was a pharmaceutical company.
So that was really neat and it gave me a lot of credibility
for understanding what they did.
[Lander] Say you're going to do computer science,
most interesting computer science problems
in the world are coming out of the life sciences
today.
Yeah, it's one thing to figure out how to optimize
getting people to click on links on a website.
Reverse engineering the circuitry
of life,
that's a great machine learning problem.
I think the best and most interesting computer
science problems, AI problems,
machine learning problems, they're going to come out of the life sciences.
[Music playing]
[Orji] I think if you're not in a bio-related
field it could still be useful in the sense of
like just thinking critically about things
that you don't know much about.
[Watife] Oh my gosh, it's super useful.
If there's anything I learned from Bio,
I described consulting as like,
you know, being a doctor but with businesses.
[Kline] I think part of coming to college
is getting an education in how to think and
how to think about things that aren't just
what you want to be thinking about all the time.
So even if you're not coming in thinking about biology, it's really important to kind of
dip your toes in and see what it's like to
think like a scientist and sort of like try on that hat.
And that that will be useful to you no
matter what you then end up doing.
