Message from the Director
Viscoelasticty
Huntington F. Willard, PhD
I feel a bit like Mr. McGuire in that scene by the swimming pool in the 1967 film The Graduate, when he tells Benjamin (played by Dustin Hoffman) "I want to say one word to you. Just one word."
For me, the word is "Viscoelasticity." An odd word, you might think, coming from a geneticist and self-avowed genome guy. As Benjamin said: "Just how do you mean that, sir?"
"Short DNA chains will relax quickly; longer molecules will take a longer time. The result? Some of the most convincing experimental evidence that chromosome-sized DNA molecules are indeed big."To me, "viscoelasticity" stands for what appears to be a fundamental weakness – or at least a missed opportunity – in our teaching strategy in higher education, especially in the sciences. While there are a few exceptions (very few) that I've heard about from colleagues around the country, most formal coursework is designed around a usually fairly narrow theme anchored firmly within a discipline. (While I speak here of the undergraduate curriculum, the same argument can be applied to many, if not most, Ph.D. programs.) Courses are designed, approved and offered, following a process that is shaped in part by the "comfort zone" of instructors and in part by a set of disciplinary standards established by departmental curriculum committees to reflect the requirements of individual majors. At face value, such a system makes some practical sense: figure out how many students have signed up for a major, determine a curriculum based on lofty but ultimately unanswerable questions like "how much biology does a biologist need to learn to call him/herself a card-carrying biologist?", and then slot the students and faculty members into the courses designed to meet those standards.
The problem with this system is that, even when departmental curriculum committees are well meaning, thoughtful and cooperative (as, in the main, I believe they are at Duke!), it is a system born of and sustained by individual disciplines. And for a university that prides itself on aggressively creative ideas to foster interdisciplinary learning and research and for a university with an increasing number of students signing up, when they can, for interdisciplinary options in certificate programs or in one of Duke's seven major interdisciplinary institutes this system both misses an obvious opportunity and creates stresses that ultimately compromise the educational mission.
So, back to viscoelasticity. One day early this semester, I found myself leading a discussion in my freshman biology seminar class on the structure of genomes and how scientists "knew" that chromosomes were indeed one continuous chain of DNA. Textbooks will tell you that; science reporters will tell you that; and each of my students had learned it in high school. But how do we actually "know"? What were the experimental approaches and observations over the past 50 years that led to this conclusion? And how sure are we that we are "right", even now? As we talked about this, I began to recount the details of what is, to me, one of biology's coolest experiments, involving stretching solutions of DNA and then allowing them to return to a relaxed state in a neat gadget called a "viscoelastometer". (Think of an elastic band wound around a pencil and you'll get the basic idea…) Short DNA chains will relax quickly; longer molecules will take a longer time. The result? Some of the most convincing experimental evidence that chromosome-sized DNA molecules are indeed big.
While we had a great time in class discussing this experiment from the 1970's, it isn't really a "biology" experiment, even though prompted by a question clearly grounded in biology and phrased in the modern parlance of genomics. The clever scientists who dreamt up this experiment were chemists and physicists, not geneticists. Even in the current world of genomics, some of the most influential and even dominant players on the national scene were not trained in the discipline of biology; they were originally trained as mathematicians and physicists who were only later attracted to the questions raised by the world of biology. I'd like to think I'm not a bad teacher, but there's no question that our discussion of this experiment (as well as any number of other problems we'll tackle this semester) could have been greatly enriched had it included a chemist or a biophysicist or an engineer to complement and balance my no doubt biased world-view as a geneticist and biologist.
If Duke really believes in interdisciplinarity (or, perhaps more accurately, multidisciplinarity), then we must consider ways to get past the current gulf between discipline-based requirements and real world explanations and experiments, which frequently benefit from integrative thinking well beyond individual dis- ciplines. Nature, after all, doesn't worry about disciplines or majors. Her solutions to problems draw on and blend any number of principles, some based in the life sciences, some in the physical world; some observational and qualitative, some highly quantitative. If we expect our students to hatch clever ideas to probe Nature's solutions, then why do we adopt academic policies that first require students to "think like a biologist" or "think like a physicist"?
There is a danger, of course, that the pendulum could swing too far in the other direction – "jack of all trades and master of none" is the phrase commonly used to defend current curricular strictures. But surely we can consider modest reductions in, say, the number of courses required in a particular major; after all, those requirements reflect an arbitrary, even if well considered, standard.
Or – somewhat more boldly – we could substitute a requirement in each major for at least one inherently interdisciplinary course, either within or between divisions or even between Trinity and Pratt. And then challenge ourselves as faculty, especially in the interdisciplinary institutes like the IGSP, to develop the most creative offerings of inter- and multidisciplinary courses, allowing our students to see different sides of each puzzle and craft diverse approaches to solve them.
Sign me up for INTERDISC 101: Probing Nature with Rubber Bands.
.Huntington F. Willard
Director