- So, thank you all for coming
to the second iteration
of our seminar series,
the science of teaching seminar series,
we're really excited
to have everyone here.
And we're really excited to welcome
today's speaker, Dr. Utpal Banerjee,
Dr. Banerjee received his PhD in chemistry
at CalTech, and also did
his post-doctoral work there
in Seymour Benzer's
lab where he started to
develop his interest into
Drosophila development.
Dr. Banerjee is currently the
Irving and Jean Stone Chair
professor, Irving and Jean
Stone Chair and professor,
of molecular cellular and
developmental biology at UCLA.
And among his many awards,
he's been named by UCLA today
as one of the top 20
professors of Bruin century.
He's received the Elizabeth W. Jones award
from the Genetics Society of America,
and he is also currently a Howard Hughes
Medical Institute professor.
And Dr. Banerjee is really a pioneer
in undergraduate education,
and that's really the reason
that we brought him here today
because he's helped develop multiple
discovery based laboratory classes
that allow students to be
involved in original research.
And these classes have
led to the publication
of multiple journal articles that include
hundreds of undergraduates as authors.
And he's also helped to create a course
that helps students learn how to,
how to interpret and understand
a scientific presentation
from some of the countries in
the world's top scientists.
And today, Dr. Banerjee, his talk,
"Construction and Deconstruction,
"Comprehensive Research Program
"for Early Undergraduates at UCLA,"
he's gonna tell us a little bit about
these different types of
classes he's developed.
So join me in welcoming, Dr. Banerjee.
(lively applause)
- Thank you, Evan, very much,
for the kind invitation and introduction.
I also want to mention that I brought
my colleague with me, Dr. Ira Clark.
Everything that I talk
about here, more or less
was developed along with Ira,
and he currently serves as
as a sort of a organization
and co-director
of the biomedical research minor
that I will talk about in a few minutes.
This is not showing the whole slide.
I hope that won't be a problem.
There's a whole line missing below this.
Which says with Ira Clark, John Olson,
Rafael Romero, and Cory Evans.
These are the four heroes of our program.
So this title, “Construction
and Deconstruction,"
where does that come from?
These are all home grown
ideas that we've come up with.
I'm not an educationist
who's gonna tell you
a lot about how to educate people.
I'm just simply going to give you
a report, on what is it that we have done,
which we feel is useful for
the undergraduate student
as part of their curriculum.
The idea of construction,
is to take large number
of simple observations,
and maybe make something which is,
which is much bigger with it.
So sort of like using these Legos sets
which can be combined together,
and if properly combined,
could build something really magnificent.
So you start with minimal elements,
large numbers of small observations
is the critical key to this.
The opposite is the
idea of deconstruction,
which is you start with something that is
as magnificent as this, perhaps like,
a research work that is going
on in somebody's laboratory,
and then now you break it down,
not so much to the very
individual Lego piece,
but to pieces like this,
such as the minaret, or the dome,
or the corridor, and so on and so forth.
Such that, one can then,
after breaking this down,
show the student how one
can take each of these
larger pieces and put the
whole structure back together.
So the two goals that Ira,
myself, and others have is
how we can best prepare our
students for careers in science,
and can we make research a core part
of the science curriculum.
In other words, can early engagement of
scientific inquiry,
improve science education?
So the usual,
usual ideas that most students have
is that they have to finish reading up
every possible textbook
and every possible course
till they go into a research laboratory.
And we tried to come
up with this experiment
maybe about ten years,
almost 12 years ago now.
To say that, let's just put the student
in front of the microscope.
That was one of the biggest challenges
when we proposed this class to UCLA.
A certain person who is a
professor in English said,
“Are you sure your students will know
"how to focus a microscope,
"because they're freshly
out of high school.”
And I said, “We'll make sure they'll know
"how to focus the microscope.”
So then, should they be able to do
really well in their didactic classes?
There's no direct proof
that it works that way
it's just that there's a
lot of indirect evidence
to suggest that these methods have
in fact, shown a lot of results,
so people have published publications
and if you want to look up,
I suggest that there are these
three pieces of publication
that people have talked about.
Vision and Change, by AAAS,
which talks about applying
the process of science,
and we really like the Vision and Change,
not just because they talk
about our programs quite a bit,
but also because it's a thoughtful
thoughtfully written monograph
on what is it that one wants to do,
what one wants to achieve and see
in undergraduate education.
The second one is this HHMI's
AAMC competency idea that
what are the basic competencies
that a student should be given
in order for them to get
into a medical school.
So this is a bit medical school oriented,
but nevertheless, this
idea of whether or not
they're getting competency
in various subjects,
rather than being taught
very large amounts
of each unit that they
are participating in,
is something that is worth looking into.
And then finally, that this PCAST,
or presidential council of advisors
on science and technology's
“Engage to Excel."
it's something that Obama had requested
and then a good friend
of ours, Jo Handelsman,
who is right now involved
in the White House for
developing programs,
has suggested for
a long period of time.
And the main idea is STEM
education and graduation rates
have to be improved in the entire country.
Two of the reasons that are often
quoted for dropout from STEM,
number one, is deficiency in mathematics,
and number two, boredom
in their science classes.
And the first one is being handled by
various groups right now at UCLA,
we are not involved
with the math education
in the program that we talk about,
but we hope that we make our science
a little more interesting,
in order to retain our students.
So this biomedical
research program at UCLA,
that we have developed together
has three different components to it.
One is called URCFG,
this is the worst acronym
that anyone can come up
with in the entire world
It's difficult to remember
exactly what it means,
but I think it's, undergraduate research
consortium in functional genomics.
Now one really nice thing
about this nice name
is that it gets the undergraduate hooked
right on the first day.
Because on the very first day,
I tell them, that look,
without even lifting a pencil,
you have now participated in
the undergraduate research
consortium in functional genomics.
How good this will sound on your CV?
So this can take about 60 students a year,
between 20-30 students per quarter,
so we can run up to 60 to 90
students in this program.
And then this research deconstruction,
which is for 300 or so students per year,
and these introductory programs are given
to first and second year students.
We like to restrict
these to people who are
freshly off of high school if we can,
the only reason we allow
a few third years students
is because we have transfer students,
and these guys have had
absolutely no ability before
to do what we are trying
to present to them.
So if someone is a transfer student,
we try to make an exception for them
because they're usually very driven.
And then from these two programs,
we take a group of
students who then become
part of this minor in biomedical research.
These programs have trained over
2,200 students in inquiry based,
research based programs
since the year 2003.
So we've been running
them for ten years now.
So now to take you through these programs.
One at a time, the URCFC
or the “hands on” research,
as I said this is a mouthful
and that that helps us.
This is the one that is
actually sponsored by the HHMI.
We took about a quarter just
to draw a picture of a fly
so that the abdomen
looks sort of like a DNA,
and still couldn't get the veins right
and the wings I guess,
But nevertheless, this
is kind of our logo here
and 771 students, so one thinks,
what change are you gonna make
by 20 to 30 students a quarter?
Well, eventually if you
have lived long enough,
you will make a lot of
changes to a lot of people.
Oh, I can see Gloria Young
right here, smiling away.
It a makes sense that
she has a bigger picture
than anyone else, she has
been a fantastic student,
a TA for the class, and also a coauthor
on a cell paper that we just published.
So, but nevertheless, lot of these people.
It says Yuki...
It's a large number of people,
but it still is small enough,
and it's small enough at a time
that we can in fact, know these people,
we know what they're doing,
and certainly John Olson,
who does the lab part of this class,
knows them very very well.
What do we do with these students?
And of course, this being a UC system,
everything has to get a course number,
and so we have called this LS10H,
research training in genes,
genetics, and genomics.
It's entirely voluntary,
it's not required by any department,
and any department's students can take it.
We've had students from
the history department,
of course MCDB and other related fields,
but any department students can take this.
And the idea here is to have
one central difficult concept,
difficult, that is for the student,
who is just starting off beyond
his or her high school days.
It has a multifaceted approach,
lab, lectures, computer and writing.
I guess it's better to
describe it as a boot camp,
rather than a class.
Within this ten week period,
they get a lot of different things to do.
Simple approaches, true
functional genomics,
but simple approaches, and
because my lab works with
Drosophila genetics primarily,
therefore we choose programs
which are usually all
Drosophila genetics based
compiling large number
of small observations
as I mentioned to you a few minutes ago.
So, in the didactic part,
and that's where I give a few lectures,
and Olson gives the rest of the lectures.
We not only talk about
background material,
but also about ethics, career options,
grant manuscript writing.
In fact, the midterm is writing
an NIH style grant proposal,
they have to do that for the
rest of their lives anyways,
so might as well get started early.
And their final is to, final exam,
is writing a manuscript,
any format is okay,
but somehow they all seem to choose cell.
Then some amount of bioinformatics,
record keeping, laboratory fly pushing,
they all have a notebook in which they
how to do all this, and they
write, they write at the end,
they will write a really nice
sort of a paper or proposal.
So these are the three major projects
that have been undertaken by URCFG.
Mosaic analysis of essential
genes during eye development,
so this has been completed.
So this is a, it's not so
hard for Drosophila people
to appreciate what is being done here,
it's a simple case of mitotic
recombination in the eye,
for genes which are otherwise lethal.
Very, very hard for the
undergraduate to appreciate
on the very first day, because
if there's one thing that
has been groomed into
their brains from day one,
is that mitosis and
recombination don't go together.
So, therefore, just to get them intrigued,
and get them thinking about
how one can have mitotic recombination,
itself, is an interesting process.
Now in this, they have taken 2,000
lethal mutations in Drosophila,
made clones in the eye,
and then studied what
their phenotypes are.
The second is a gene
based lineage analysis.
This has also been completed.
700 genes that have been
studied for development
in brain, blood, eye, wing of Drosophila.
And then this is what they're doing now,
RNAi screen for controlling hematopoiesis
and cardiac development.
5,000 mutations are
being studied this way.
To give you an idea of how much work
is involved in each of these projects,
this is project one, took about two
and a half years to complete,
about 3,000 separate introductory
experiments performed,
greater than 120,000
Drosophila crosses performed,
2,000 mutant stocks,
1,375 published stocks,
1,576 verified phenotypes,
and then excisions
to show that they are real.
So this is a tremendous amount of work,
which I don't think anyone
will want to take on,
in anyone's own laboratory,
unless one is crazy,
and the idea is that you just simply
give each person a whole
bunch of these lines,
which have got lethal mutations on it,
and they become homozygous in the eye.
And when that happens, you end up with
all kinds of mutate phenotypes,
which they then create databases for,
and then the real part of the work
is the analysis of the data.
They go back and look at the genes,
what the functions are, might be,
and why they got picked
up in their screen.
That's what they write in
their discussion sections.
The second one had to do with creating
this Gal4-expressing line
which causes lineage tracing.
This is for people who work on mouse here.
This is as if you were doing
a rosa mouse experiment,
except with every gene that is
there in the genome made into
one of these cre-lox excision systems.
So you can then create a situation
where we're just looking at GFP and RFP,
the cells which are currently
expressing a certain gene,
and the cells which used
to express that gene.
This is a lineage
tracking which can be done
by just having a GFP and RFP scope,
and being able to do these dissections,
and they have done that for
a very large number of genes.
And the third one is to take these
florescent flies, that larvae,
that we have generated, such that,
only the blood system is highlighted here.
The circulating cells and
the heart and the blood,
and then give the heart
and the blood becomes
more or less, or melanotic tumors form,
then they can score those
for different RNA eye lines.
A lot of work, this is just taking
the labels on their
vials and then, putting
one on top of the other.
This is kind of a statement.
Now this is degenerated,
they have started putting
years on it, and making
it into a Mickey Mouse,
so I've stopped photographing it.
But it's a huge amount.
This is a solid ball of labels,
up to that height.
Okay, we also have various
high school programs.
One school that we had
adopted early on is,
Loyola High School.
Simply because a teacher
from Loyola High School
was sincere enough to come
and take this class with us at UCLA.
They go back to his lab,
and then have them do this,
not in the larvae, but in the adult fly.
This is John Olson, a
person who teaches at UCLA,
he then visits Loyola High School,
which I have done as well,
and then talk to them there.
But our larger program is where
during the summer, these students come,
and then this is the high school outreach.
And about 10-12 students, sometimes 15,
about 70 students have been trained
with the same program
that the undergraduates...
And they seem to do well,
in terms of where they want to go.
So everything needs to have
some kind of a output that says that
a certain amount of work was done,
and I know that the
post-docs invited me here,
so one of the ways in which I want to
I want to emphasize here,
is that one does not need
to give up all research
and just concentrate on teaching students
in order to make this worthwhile,
that in fact, one will
embellish and help the other.
So this was our first
paper in PLoS Biology,
with 134 students,
undergraduate students
included as authors,
and then this was beaten by
our genetics paper in 2007,
264 undergraduate
authors, I believe still,
this is still the record of the number of
undergraduate students on any publication,
but we have now another paper
which is supposed to go out pretty soon,
which beats this number by a little bit,
300 something.
Okay, so.
There are also various tool
and techniques that come out.
For example, this G-trace technique,
other than Cory Evans, John Olson,
and here obviously, Volker Hartenstein,
Gerarld Call and myself,
everybody else here
is an undergraduate student.
And together, they developed this method
for lineage tracing, which
came out in Nature Methods.
For our assessment purposes,
there are many different
things that are done.
The usual UCLA assessment is made,
but we also send out all the
data to Grinnell College,
which does independent
assessments in a blind fashion.
And you can see the triangles represent
the Grinnell College assessments,
compared to the various programs,
and I think they've got tens
of thousands of students
included in their nationwide programs,
which serves as controls.
And so in many different categories,
this is a self reported system,
so it has it's problems,
but at least we are doing okay.
Now this is the slide
that I'm most proud of,
and Ira did a lot of work
with other people in UCLA
to dig these numbers out.
For our underrepresented
minorities within this program,
the STEM retention has
been 100% in 10 years time.
For the overall program,
it's 95.2%, 96% of women.
And this is not just a flash
in the pan, one program,
of course this is all 771
not quite this quarter, but many,
750 students, put together,
over the last ten years.
So it will average out any kind of
irregularities in the system.
For comparison, national average is 35.1,
UCLA average is considerably better, 69.3,
but UCLA underrepresented minorities
is not good, 48.8.
We still do not have as many
URM students as we should,
and one of our goals
over the next year or two
is really to increase the number of URMs,
but the retention is quite nice.
This is only the first program that
we have gotten the retention numbers on,
we are in the process of working
it out for the other stuff.
Okay, so what does
research deconstruction?
This was just some figment
of our imagination,
thinking that won't it be good
if one were to listen
to how an experiment is done first,
and then to be explained?
See everyone does that.
The English professor doesn't first
come and tell the
students what Shakespeare
or Byron really meant
in their ballad or poem.
They first read the ballad or the poem,
then there is an analysis done
on what it is that they actually read.
We on the other hand, as scientists,
as technically competent
and critical as we are,
we go and tell them,
this is exactly how cell division works,
this is exactly how the cytoplasm
is supposed to react,
under this condition,
that condition, the membrane.
Sometimes we tell them it is fluid,
sometimes we tell them the organelles
are like phase transitions,
we just tell them, what
is it supposed to be
instead of first giving an example of
how we know, what we know,
and then try to explain to them.
And we're taught that if
we took that approach,
with starting students, won't it be good?
And we have in fact, tried this even with
general education, and it seems to work.
We have now done this for
a long period of time.
So what is it that we do?
By the way, this particular,
this deconstructing
scientific tool etcetera,
is published in PLoS Biology, and again,
it was mentioned in Vision and Change,
as one of the, one of the many
bonafide methods for
achieving this inquiry based learning.
So what is it that we do?
Up to 90 students, mostly
first and second year.
And we would first have a
full scale research seminar.
This is by an invited faculty
member who can talk about
we tell them not to dilute it down,
we like it to be full of data,
philosophical talks are not
very good to deconstruct.
If there's a lot of data in
it, that really is good for us.
So they give this full
scale research seminar,
as you can imagine, we
have an eminent scientist
coming and talking to a group of students
who are just off of high school,
and so everything that he or she says,
they nod, but it kind of goes
above their ability to comprehend.
But largely, they pay a lot of attention,
because they really want to know
what is it that this
person is telling them.
We then video tape this seminar,
and then we place it on
a website with copy of
everything for the students
to review if they wish.
And then they have they
deconstruction classes,
and this is the critical
part of the whole program,
which is that we then have a lecturer
or professor, who comes in
and takes that seminar,
as if that seminar was a textbook,
and every ten minute
segment of that seminar
is then analyzed and deconstructed,
so to speak, into little pieces
for the fundamental that
one was trying to achieve.
Of importance is, what
is it that the scientist
who was doing this experiment
was thinking, was doing.
Scientists, when they
give talks have a way of
giving talks as a story telling.
That's a method that we know works
really well for expert learning.
And I want to make this difference
between expert learning
and what is going on here.
Many people would ask that if
discussions are so important,
then why are you giving this
talk in a lecture format here?
Because this is expert learning,
where one is already primed
to listen to somebody
and they are all equals in
terms of what the content is.
This is not the same as a person
trying to learn how to do research,
who has had no experience
doing research before.
So these deconstruction classes
are done over a five week period.
So say, one and a half hours lectures,
so that would be maybe 10, 15 hours
worth of lectures that are given to them.
And then, a question answer session,
which is very important,
The original speaker is invited back
at the end of the series,
and it's amazing to watch
that these same students
who were quietly listening
to this person the first day
then become very verbal and
they start talking about it
because in the meantime
they have listened to
a deconstruction of all the lecture
but they've also read various things
that this person has done
and related studies on which they have
been quizzed and tested
and so on, so forth.
Okay, the nice thing is,
the reason we developed this is
because it's easy to export it,
Not every place will
have the resources needed
to have the hands on experience.
It's scalable, so we
are no longer limited to
the 15-20 students, we can
do it now with 100 students.
It's adaptable to multiple
research disciplines,
so it does not have to be based
solely on Drosophila genetics,
which is what I understand,
and therefore I am limited to.
But this can be done for anybody else.
And it works in Hebrew
because Benny Shilo tried it,
and tries it every year,
at the Weizmann Institute
with a lot of good results.
So here's an example.
And I'll show you several clips of this.
So here is Benhur Lee,
one of our premier virologists
at UCLA, who will talk
about the Nipah virus.
And then, right after that Rafael Romero,
one of our instructors,
will take a small part of
what Benhur said, and
will try to deconstruct it
that makes it understandable
to undergraduate.
- As you can see, they optimize,
they codon optimize a protein,
gives you many more syncytia,
this is just how you quantify syncytia,
than the well tech sequences.
And so, this is just, I
know you can't see it,
but it's real, you just have to be used to
seeing these kinds of syncytia
when you transinfect,
you codon optimize F and G glycoproteins,
you get many more syncytia formation
than in the well tech version
and you need to basically
codon optimize both, F and G,
one by itself is not sufficient
to give you the kind of
phenotype that you want to analyze.
- So you're gonna have some G's,
and gonna have some F's, and some G's,
they're gonna be on the
surface of the cell.
All right, in other words this cell
is making viral proteins,
you force the cell to do this,
but you need it to do this experiment.
And it's another way to
work with those proteins,
without working with the virus itself.
All right, so in other
words, when these two
when G connects to F right here,
and G connects to F right here,
these two will actually
stick, they will attach,
just like a virus would.
And when it attaches, because
you've got the F protein,
remember the F protein
was essential for fusion,
these will actually fuse,
like they were a virus and a cell.
And so what do you call this, right here?
We call this a syncytia.
- Then, the point is that you can do this
with large numbers of students,
but it's efficacy goes up if
the number of students is smaller.
And so if you have a few students who are
at a more advanced stage of learning,
where they have already taken
the first couple of classes
then we bring in some experts to
turn the knob up a little bit more,
and then we do this, what's known as
the enhanced deconstruction class.
This is something that Ira teaches here.
And they are...
This is sort of...
There's at little bit more of
primary literature reading,
student presentations,
strong writing component.
The reason why we tried this
was because remember that
le pato assessment scheme,
we found that there were many places,
and I'll show you this,
where the students do well,
as well as the hands on experience,
but there are other things that
we are not concentrating on,
such as student presentations,
and strong writing components,
and there it automatically drops.
And so, is it possible to use this method
to get a higher output?
And it is.
So here's an example of the kind of,
a little more complex
thing that would be done.
Which is, we brought in
Tim Lane to talk about
Wnt signaling and breast cancer.
So this is a complicated sounding paper,
which is, about which Tim gives a talk.
And then, in the deconstruction of it,
they are learning a
lot of different things
So it's not as much as a lack of breadth
and depth only as one would think.
There is the cancer biology,
signal transduction pathways,
what is wnt pathway,
cell cycles, ubiquitin-mediated
so on and so forth.
Most importantly though, the techniques,
transgenic mice, immunostaining,
so kind of what controls will you use,
RT-PCR, what kind of
reference RNAs will you use,
what kind of loading
controls will you use,
and it makes a big difference.
As all of you are educators,
so I don't have to emphasize this,
that looking at a gel in a paper,
versus saying what did
the person actually do?
They ran, took this, they
grounded out, they ran this,
then they used an antibody
and so on and so forth.
It completely changes the
perspective with which
the individual student
looks at that gel again.
So here is Katherine Plath
who works on IPS cells,
and this is from one of the
enhanced deconstruction thing.
- If we had G418 which is
drugged into the medium
and says don't express this neomycin gene,
then the cells will die, so
but if marker was expressed,
then the cells will
survive, in drug-medium.
Basically this way of selecting
for a reprogram colony host,
it puts in these perfectors
into these cells,
and then he puts the drug
select for this expression
for this promoter into the medium
and just waits if anything goes out.
and he gets something,
and that's what we called
induced pluripotent stem cell.
- You're getting at
what was actually used,
and what ends up being a
very useful strategy here.
So a lot is remembering
that in upper class seminar,
they use drug resistance
to identify the rare cells,
that are expressing the
embryonic stem cell genes.
You guys have all seen reporter chains,
for those of you who were in 5HA,
saw a reporter genes in Dr. Arispe's work,
where she had VEGF lag-Z
she had the promoter
of VEGF driving lag-Z,
so you could see in the animal
which cells were
expressing the VEGF chain.
If you were in LS10H, used reporter genes,
because remember you
had all these Gal4 lines
Those Gal4 lines was turned
on, was expressing Gal4
in different tissues in the fly,
different cells in the fly,
and that was because
Gal4 had been inserted
next to a promoter, an
enhancer, of a neurobine chain
that was active in those cells.
The point is that when
the promoter is active,
when this gene is expressed,
now instead of Fbx15 is made,
you'll make whatever reporter
gene you put in there.
You'll turn on the gene
for neomycin resistance.,
And so that's what the Yamanaka
group used as their assay.
So the fibroblast going to be resistant
or sensitive to neomycin?
Fibroblast should be sensitive.
because this chain should be off.
Now, if we get that rare
cell that's behaving like
an embryonic stem cell,
than what would we expect?
Would the cell be resistant or sensitive?
Should be resistant, so
that's what we're looking for.
- I'm sorry, he's not
answering his own questions.
We have a very primitive recording device,
where we cannot hear the
students are answering
and he, then Ira, is going back
and reinforcing the answer.
(laughs)
So in terms of the diversity,
we take so many different
professors from UCLA.
Everyone that you'll
recognize in your own field.
So all kinds of different people
will talk about different things.
It's a hard thing to teach
because every quarter,
you have to, the person who's
teaching it has to learn
a new field in order to teach
the undergraduate students,
now that's a little
difficult, but of course,
that's why we have people like Ira.
So, as I said,
the competency goes up in various things,
not in every aspect for which we have
the enhanced deconstruction.
Now, we don't want to be left behind
in this sort of
online activities and education
and so on and so forth.
We don't believe that's
the only way to teach
an undergraduate student,
but what we did was to show
that you can actually do deconstruction of
something which is actually online.
So this is David Morgan from UCSF,
and Ron Vale has made a large number of
online lectures by various
professors across the country.
We took that online version,
we deconstructed it,
and then we called him back by Skype
and had him answer questions.
And the whole process is now been
video taped thanks to HHMI,
and we're going to put that
on the web as a website,
so anyone who wants to see
what activities and what
other things they did,
they'll be able to do that.
So here is the online.
And you can see that the quality
of video is much improved.
- For example,
N6-benzyl-ATP can be used by
the analog sensitive Cdk1
kinase but cannot be used
by a wild type kinase
because that bulky ATP analog
can't fit into the wild type active site.
And so, of course, if
you put a radio-label
on the gamma phosphate
of this bulky ATP analog
and then add this kinase
to a crude cell lysate
what you hope to get is
the specific labeling
of just the direct targets
of that protein kinase
and no other kinases in the cell lysate
because those other kinases
can't use this bulky ATP analog.
- So this is the iBio
seminar taken from the web,
and then we can get this one deconstructed
I won't play all of it because
I'm running out of time.
- What's the flaw of the experiment that
I'm proposing right here?
- If there are any other kinases
or substrates in the tube,
then those substrates will
also be phosphorylated.
- Right and where are
those kinases gonna come?
(faint reply)
- All right, so you'd
imagine this cell lysate
is going to have other kinases.
Sure, I mean there are many
different types of kinases in cells
And kinases use ATP to phosphorylate
so what are ATP are they going to be using
in my particular test?
- Okay, so you get the idea.
And here is David Morgan then,
called back from his office
at UCSF.
- And also we talked a lot.
(cough)
- Hi, when running the mass spec,
you attempted to find substrates of
CBK1 in an unbiased fashion,
but then at the end of the experiment,
you identified the substrates via
consensus sequence, correct?
- Yeah--
- Do you find in a way that that biases
the experiment itself,
and do you think that
you missed substrates based on that?
- Yeah, that's a great question.
Basically, there's this long
history in the field of CBK
there is no known
substrate real bonafide--
- Okay, sorry to cut you off.
But you get the point.
That they start talking
a lot more when they have
already gone through the
deconstruction classes.
Okay.
A small number of students
from each of these programs
is then taken into our minor
in biomedical research.
This is a minor
which now has almost 200 students.
And this is the idea,
they have already been
recruited early, so now we
place them into laboratories.
Extensive research commitment,
at least four quarters,
but much longer usually,
for three years normally.
They get research training courses,
and they get some courses
in the social sciences,
either a history or philosophy of science,
or a bioethics class which they have to
take in order to fulfill the minor.
And then at the end they
have to write a thesis.
Now, my minor was launched in 2007,
it's provided research
training to 340 students
in 147 laboratories at UCLA,
from 30 different departments.
I mean there are certain advantages of
being in a place for 30 something
you know 20 something years, 25 years,
you know everyone, so
when you tell them to
please take your student into their class,
and they have been trained already,
they have been picked, and picked,
nobody usually says no.
It's very easy to find people,
particularly in the medical school,
to take these students in.
195 students are in 95
different laboratories
in the school of medicine.
Now, expert learning.
At this point then, these students are
starting to become experts,
they have already gotten a
certain amount of background
at this point, we start bringing them in
at 18 students or so together,
and they discuss what it
is it they're doing in
their laboratories with each other present
and with two other instructors present.
This has many purposes,
so people often ask what's
the difference between
a journal club and the
deconstruction process.
This is the difference.
Here, this is more
similar to a journal club,
now they are coming in,
they're talking about their own work,
they're quite an expert in their own work,
the advantage of this is, they're
making these presentations
with other students present there.
So if they have been washing glassware,
and the other person is about
to publish a paper in Nature,
they know the difference.
We don't need to tell them that.
It is very clear, having to present,
make these presentations
in front of your peers.
We are always petrified doing it,
they're petrified doing it too.
So, as a result, the
learning goes up enormously,
and this is something,
Cory Evans does this,
and to define the research topic,
what are the messages,
how should they have the
slides, personal style,
oral presentation, critical
questions and ideas,
and so on and so forth.
This is Cory's
experience with the students.
And expertise, I'm sorry.
Now the thing is that these minors,
we have started in 2007, they
have published 90 papers,
this does not include my
papers that we talked about
with multiple 300 authors
and so on, so forth.
Not including those.
These are students who have gone to labs,
including our own lab, but
to many different labs,
and then they have
published papers from there.
And there are 90 publications from
these students in pretty good journals,
and 35% of all the students
have at least a publication.
And we are trying to hope
that this will even go up,
but this is quite good number of papers.
Ira, with a lot of work, had made a list
like this of all 90 that would have taken
about three or four minutes to show,
so with apologies to him, I took that out.
Here is his first page and of course,
I'm so grateful, that
our recent cell paper
got highlighted as the first
one, this is Ira's doing.
Thank you.
And then the various other,
but these two students, Gloria and Denali,
they didn't just get on there,
they did a lot of work.
This paper talks about olfactory control
and Gloria actually took
all 25 olfactory receptors,
knocked them out, and looked
at the blood phenotype,
and so on and so forth.
So it's a lot of work that
these students put in,
and there are 90 papers like that.
After a two gap years,
because that's the fashion these days,
these students always want
to take one or two gap years.
During that gap years,
they do great things,
They go to Cold Spring
Harbor and work there,
they come to UCSD and work there,
and they do fantastic things,
but after that 84% of our
students that we have tracked
in fact gone on to graduate degrees.
45% MDs expected,
but a significant number of PhDs
of either MD-PhD or PhD kind.
26 plus 18 percent, that's a
significant number of students
who then are going into
research based graduate
programs after finishing this.
And one also hopes that the MS
an so on, so forth, will
also join into that group.
They go to good places.
And they get a lot of
different kinds of awards.
Now I'm going to take exactly
two minutes, or three minutes,
to make this one kind of appeal,
mainly for again, the post-docs
that have invited me here.
which is to say, that I don't think
spending this much time
with education programs and developing
these programs hurts anybody's careers.
This is a common misunderstanding
which has been complicated of course
by our tenure communities
and so on and so forth.
Not giving proper importance to education,
but if one plays one's cards right,
just don't go die for a cause.
There's a good way to get a lot out of
this whole thing as well.
I know I'm sounding a little cynical here,
but it does make, either
you can benefit a lot
from involving the undergraduates,
and the undergraduates benefit a lot
from their involvement in these programs.
So here is the third,
is the third program of our LS10,
that we were talking about,
which is a screen for,
which is a screen for various kinds
of blood mutations in flies.
Now what we did was to
take all of the positives
that the students got from the screen,
and Bama who is a post-doc in my lab,
then did a little bit more
fancy analysis on them,
just about, he spent about
four, five months on it.
So here are the blood cells in Drosophila,
circulating hemocytes,
and then they look for all
these different phenotypes.
This is what the students do,
along with all the other
stuff that I mentioned doing.
Now, why am I showing you this?
665 of those 5,000 lines
that have been tested
were considered positives by the students.
Now, when my post-doc
repeats it, 215 are real.
Okay, so please do not go
and start sending papers out
with raw data that you
get from the classes.
Get them validated.
It's not because the students are not
paying attention or making things up.
They truly see those as phenotypes.
It could be a chunk of food
stuck to their cuticle,
for all you know, but on the other hand,
they see that as a phenotype,
they photograph it.
But only one third of them are real,
but nevertheless, that's a lot of genes
182 genes corresponding
to those 215 mutations,
so these are all the genes.
Anyone wants to work
on any Drosophila gene?
I can give a list of them
for people to work on.
Now if you're doing an
analysis of these genes
you'll find various clusters
of who interacts with whom.
And if you take say,
just one group of genes,
the CSNs which are the signaler zones,
which are very important for cell cycle.
One finds that in this
three to four year period,
by having people working
in groups of 30, 15 or 30.
They don't know each other,
they got random genes assigned to them.
This is what they picked up.
CSN1B, four, eight, seven, five, three,
six, and this one is
called alien Drosophila.
These all interact with each other.
They found the cop 9 complex
which is very important
for a whole variety of
reasons, but they're all
in stem or progenitor cell maintenance,
it's just now being figured out.
And so, one can follow this
up and look at what happens
to the circulating
cells, they can be less,
they can be these gigantic cells forming,
they can be these, what are
known as melanocytes forming.
These cells, I don't
even know what they are.
It's just open there.
These are bi-nucleid cells
which need to be analyzed.
So the point is, there
is a huge trough of data
that can come out of these programs,
which then can be analyzed
at much greater detail
for it's research importance as well.
So those of you that are
planning to go to small schools
to use undergraduates, go for it.
The NIH wil support
smaller research programs like that
for doing something that
generates a large amount of data
I have to thank Ira Clark, John Olson,
Rafael Romero, and Cory Evans.
The four people who are the instructors
and they have various titles in addition
to being instructors.
We have a half time person who helps
us with administration,
and we thank all the Deans,
and these are the advisory
committee members,
and there are 145 UCLA
affiliate faculty members.
Thank you very much.
(applause)
- [Voiceover] We have
room for a few questions.
- Who me?
Okay.
Hi, so we, we have a research project
that we have in the
undergraduate labs here as well
which I'll talk to you more
about at the round table.
My question addresses
the quality control issue
that you talked about a few minutes ago,
and so if students are
identifying things incorrectly
or entering data in our case,
incorrectly, into databases,
do you then look back
and have somebody verify
all of the information before you publish?
- Everything. Yes.
You wouldn't publish it in Genetics
or PloS Biology with
mistakes in it, so we have.
It's a matter of having
a system worked out.
Initially one thing
that we used to do was,
there are these students who
instead of wanting to go to,
instead of wanting to
go to other laboratories
as part of our minor.
There are a group of students
who want to just stay on,
to doing what they were doing,
particularly during summers, okay?
We call them lifers.
And these lifers just don't want to leave.
We have kicked them
out, we have gotten them
to the next step, but
they just want to stay
with this one little LS10H program.
They then become tutors
to the next generation
and then they also become so proficient
that during one summer,
they could probably repeat
everything that has been
done for a whole year
or maybe two years time.
What we can't do is to
repeat every experiment.
So if some experiment has
had a negative result,
that ultimately gets lost.
And we just have to live with that,
that if someone had a brillant mutant,
but didn't score it, that's
probably lost forever,
but if someone says they
have a positive result,
which is what we will publish,
then we have that repeated again.
Now, having said that each of these lines
that they are screening in the class,
so for the latest one,
we give them about 30 to 40
of these lines to screen.
Each student over the ten
week period, 30 to 40.
It's mixed in such a way
that over different quarters,
or within the same quarter,
ten of them are completely unique,
and ten of them may have been
used in previous quarters,
ten of them may have been
used and scored as positives
so we have an internal control
over the quarters as well
In order to see that the same
thing gets checked twice.
But instead of, in spite of
getting it checked twice,
there's still problems, so
they have to be resolved either
with summer students or in
this case, I just thought,
okay this post-doc of mine is fantastic,
so for him to recheck everything,
took only a few months.
- Hi, I'm completely blown away
by your data on retention rates,
and graduate school,
and I've been involved
in some interventions, and
we don't even come close,
but one of the questions
that has been raised
when I've tried to talk about the value
of these interventions
is self-selection bias,
meaning that you know,
the students who went to
whatever activity, were the good students,
and it's been very difficult for me
to try to find ways for addressing that,
and I wonder if you have
any thoughts on that.
- Yes, that's a very common,
of course in particularly for
us, we have no problem saying
that we are taking motivated students
and the goal of our program
is to take motivated students
and make them outstanding.
And give them the best
that UCLA can offer.
So that's point number one.
Point number two is, yes,
there's a self-selection bias.
But, if self selection was the only
reason for URM drop outs,
then I think some of the
really strong schools
that have got extremely
high GPA requirements,
extremely high sort of
selective advantage over other schools,
I'm not naming such
schools in the East Coast
that charge very high amounts of tuition,
would not have any URM problem.
Because look, they got
the best of the best,
of the best, from the whole country.
And so why should there be
any STEM retention problem?
If one looks at those schools,
one finds that they face,
and they will be the first ones to agree,
that they face as much of
a STEM retention problem
as a public university does.
And so STEM retention
is not just a matter of
having the good group of students,
of course that is one of the aspects.
But it is also a matter of having
a positive input into those students,
so that they are
continuously reassured that
this is a good path that they have chosen.
And I think you could
easily make that case,
and people who don't want
to listen, well, they won't.
But I think this is a
reasonable case to make,
because there is no other easy way,
I mean this is one of
those damned if you do,
damned if you don't, right?
I mean if your rates are
going up, then it must be
because the students are so good.
If your rates are not going up,
then you must be doing something wrong.
But that's not the case here.
I think there's a positive intervention
for all kinds of students.
For example the ones that get bored
sitting in a lecture, and just decide
it's so much more exciting
to be doing drama,
or to be doing accounting,
or whatever it is
that they find interesting.
Those students, when they
come to these classes
on a daily basis, they are told that,
it's not my job to tell you
whether you should be an MD
or a PhD or a nurse, or a journalist,
but understand what is
it that a scientist does.
And understand where they come from,
and then make your decisions.
I think that would be a good way to do it.
And I think that's a positive thing too.
- Thank you.
- [Voiceover] Maybe a follow up to that.
So, at UCSD we have a
lot of biology majors,
maybe 6,000 or so, and at UCLA,
you have a large number as well.
Do you have any selection
process early on?
Or is it just, they just sign up.
- Yeah, they just sign up.
The thing is that the, you're
talking earliest stage.
At the earliest stage,
there is a small amount
of GPA requirement,
we don't take somebody
who is really struggling,
such as 2.9 GPA or something like that.
I don't remember whether the
GPA is three or not, 3.0.
Which is not a very high bar at UCLA,
starting undergraduates at
UCLA all have 3.0 GPA averages.
Well, maybe not but a lot of them
have over 3.0 GPA averages.
And then, if someone comes and says,
"Oh, you know I messed up, I
would really like to do this."
We don't say no to such people.
And they have to have taken AP
Biology, is what we ask them.
But then if someone comes and says,
"Well I don't have AP
Biology, my high school
"never offered it," we waive that as well.
So there's almost,
minimal amount of requirements.
What is difficult is to control for
the student's enthusiasm,
obviously they heard
from somebody else this
is a great class to take,
and you'll learn a lot, you'll do things,
and then they come and sign up,
so they are self-selecting for that.
- Well, one last question?
- I think it was answered,
but my question was,
is there a feed forward off of
their basic biology courses,
do these students, but I think you said
they are not doing, they
are not taking Bio one,
two, three, 'cause they've
already had AP, is that right?
- Oh no.
At UCLA, you do.
- You do, okay.
So now, is there an
effect on their grades?
- Yeah I wish I knew how to do this.
I have tried to do that.
What I have tried to do
is not so much Bio one,
two, three, which they
take kind of concurrently,
but to see whether or not
developmental biology for example,
which is 138, which they
will take a year later,
whether there's any changes
or not, it's not as easy
to find those ideal situations.
There are five different instructors
that teach developmental biology.
Some students take it
in their second year,
some take it in their fourth year.
When something is, when your
control is chaotic like that,
it is really difficult to
see how they are doing,
if you asked me, do they
get A's, yes they get A's.
But is that assessment?
I don't think that's assessment.
Yeah, I mean, do they get more A's
than a lot of other students?
That's where the problem comes in.
Who am I going to choose
who's going to be,
who's going to have this motivation,
and in their cohort group,
and has taken Developmental Biology
with one individual person,
be it Volker Hartenstein,
or Luisa Arispe, or different people teach
in different quarters so this
has been a difficult parameter
to establish, we have tried
to do it, it's not so easy.
Yes?
- I think that there is a
different skill set required
in laboratory courses
than in lecture courses.
We think that a lot of students
who can ace lecture courses
one after another, after
another, they've got straight A's
in every class they've
been assessed by exams,
but they get into a lab
course and they flounder,
they're asked to do very
different kinds of things,
and I was wondering what
your thoughts are on that?
- Yeah, no, absolutely.
There's students of every kind,
then there are the ones that
can really self-correct a lot.
And good for them that
they can self-correct,
so they will do poorly in one thing,
and then they will realize that,
they change their own habits.
This is not a science experiment.
I wish it was, then
everything could be done
in a properly controlled manner.
So yeah there are lots of students
who do extremely well in...
Didactic courses,
there too, there are ones that do well,
I mean I used to teach
genetics, and we used to do
a lot of problem solving.
And there are some who
are great problem solvers.
You give them any problem
that involves math,
they can solve it and
they'll the others who say,
I went into biology because
I thought I didn't need
to learn any math, so there's
every possibility there.
And what can I say, we
take a group of students,
this is why I started off
saying that I don't pretend
to have any education background.
All I can say is, take
a bunch of students,
figure out what is best for them,
and give them that, and if
your numbers go up, feel good.
- [Voiceover] Well let's
thank Dr. Banerjee again.
(applause)
- Thank you very much.
