Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their development of a powerful gene editing tool known as the CRISPR-Cas9 system. In this short film, Doudna, Charpentier, and Martin Jinek, who was a post-doc at the time in Doudna’s lab, describe how their famous collaboration happened and share the story behind the influential experiments that led to their discovery.

Parasitic plants are important in natural ecosystems and in agriculture. Parasitism is a successful life strategy that has convergently evolved in all kingdoms of life.

Do students learn more with clickers and peer-discussion?

Bill Wood (University of Colorado, Boulder) describes the Knight et al. study, which looks at student learning gains in an active learning classroom that utilizes clicker questions and peer-discussion, similar to a think-pair-share.

Think-Pair-Share is an active learning technique that can be used in small or large enrollment courses to engage students and encourage them to practice scientific thinking skills. In think-pair-share, students think about their answer to a question, pair with a partner to debate their choice, and then share their answers with the class. In this video showing examples of think-pair-share in action, Kimberly Tanner (San Francisco State University) shares her experience using this method in classrooms of all sizes.

Clickers are Audience Response Systems that enable instructors to ask a multiple-choice question, poll students for an answer, and display the aggregated results to the class. In this video showing examples of active learning classroom models, Bill Wood (University of Colorado Boulder) describes how clickers can be used effectively to engage students.

How can one shift from a teacher-centered to a student-centered classroom model? What are the benefits of active learning for students and instructors?

What are the issues with traditional undergraduate biology education? What is the role of an educator in a 21st century college classroom? What is missing in the way we currently teach science in college?

We have an online Q&A (hosted on January 6th, 2021) discussing the benefits and limitations of preprints from the perspective of early-career scientists. Panelists included Jessica Polka, Elizabeth Silva (Associate Dean of Graduate Programs at UCSF and former editor at PLoS), and Kate Carbone (an industry postdoc).

Course Directors A. Malcolm Campbell, Kimberly Tanner, and Bill Wood talk about the reasons why we need to reform undergraduate biology education and why they got involved in the Scientific teaching Series project.

Dr. Harold Varmus talks to Dan Rather about his journey from literature major to scientist, and from the discovery of oncogenes to creating PLoS. Varmus reflects on his time as a researcher, as Director of the NIH, and on the importance of open communication in science. He ends by emphasizing why good science communication is important to engage more people in conversations about science.