of money and often a lot of it. Science has also become internationally institutionalized by which I mean many studies; especially those involving physics, and genetics, involve many complementary disciplines, including an international caste of participants for which the list of authors and their affiliations will be obvious in some of the studies I’ve chosen to highlight in this series. The scope of the series In such a short series such as this it’s obviously impossible to cover Science Science is far too broad for that. It would take a whole – undergraduate course to cover Science in any meaningful way. And in any case, I’m hardly qualified to speak for Science as a whole. What I’ve chosen to do rather is to hone in on a few selected topics, which in my opinion stand out, either because they pose important issues for the public, now or if not just now, the near future. Those topics include gene editing, and or as it is more popularly known. artificial intelligence AI, Other topics include perennial favorites such as the story of how humans evolved and social intelligence in apes and humans. Yet others are interesting for their own sake such as using genomic data to track human migrations. In each case I intend to use at least one primary source to give participants a feel for how scientists go about their business. In the later choice, I’ve taken a page from my Oxford days when I served as an advisor for a unique undergraduate course in Physiology. Unlike most undergraduate courses in other universities, which tried to cover everything, this one focused on the hundred most influential papers of the last fifty years. So the students were in at the deep end right off but soon learned from the very best mentors, the authors of those original papers, what went into their work the – questions asked, the methods chosen to answer the questions and the analysis and critique of the results topped off by replicating the – original studies in the laboratory to give participants a real sense of the technological challenges faced by the original investigators and the limitations of their methods. Of course replicating studies was possible in only about a third of the studies. But by the end of the year the students had acquired an unrivaled grasp of the most influential key studies in neurophysiology a much better experience than working – through information gleaned from lectures, texts and reviews. It was an approach I tried to continue with postgraduate students throughout my
of money and often a lot of it. Science has also become internationally institutionalized by which I mean many studies; especially those involving physics, and genetics, involve many complementary disciplines, including an international caste of participants for which the list of authors and their affiliations will be obvious in some of the studies I’ve chosen to highlight in this series. The scope of the series In such a short series such as this it’s obviously impossible to cover Science – Science is far too broad for that. It would take a whole undergraduate course to cover Science in any meaningful way. And in any case, I’m hardly qualified to speak for Science as a whole. What I’ve chosen to do rather is to hone in on a few selected topics, which in my opinion stand out, either because they pose important issues for the public, now or if not just now, the near future. Those topics include gene editing, and artificial intelligence or AI, as it is more popularly known. Other topics include perennial favorites such as the story of how humans evolved and social intelligence in apes and humans. Yet others are interesting for their own sake such as using genomic data to track human migrations. In each case I intend to use at least one primary source to give participants a feel for how scientists go about their business. In the later choice, I’ve taken a page from my Oxford days when I served as an advisor for a unique undergraduate course in Physiology. Unlike most undergraduate courses in other universities, which tried to cover everything, this one focused on the hundred most influential papers of the last fifty years. So the students were in at the deep end right off but soon learned from the very best mentors, the authors of those original papers, what went into their work – the questions asked, the methods chosen to answer the questions and the analysis and critique of the results – topped off by replicating the original studies in the laboratory to give participants a real sense of the technological challenges faced by the original investigators and the limitations of their methods. Of course replicating studies was possible in only about a third of the studies. But by the end of the year the students had acquired an unrivaled grasp of the most influential key studies in neurophysiology – a much better experience than working through information gleaned from lectures, texts and reviews. It was an approach I tried to continue with postgraduate students throughout my
Dr.-Brown-1.docx