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In today's podcast, Ilona talks with Natalie Kuldell, a scientist and instructor in MIT's Department of Biological Engineering. Natalie began her career as a microbiologist, and her interest in education led her to apply her scientific knowledge to what she calls "authentic" curriculum development. With funding from the NSF, Natalie created BioBuilder, an online resource for both teachers and students about synthetic biology. BioBuilder features short, animated primers that explain the basics of gene expression alongside some foundational tools for engineering biology. This information is combined into teachable activities that explore how scientists can control the genes of microorganisms to enable new discoveries, or to construct useful new biological systems. As a part of the NSF-funded Engineering Research Center known as SynBERC, BioBuilder makes an important contribution by offering accessible, easy to use, and easy to learn from material that is appropriate for both high school and college classrooms. Listen to this podcast to learn how you can use BioBuilder. [10:51 ]
Full transcript
ILONA MIKO: Welcome to the latest edition of NatureEdCast. I'm Ilona Miko and today we're talking to Natalie Kuldell, professor of biological engineering at MIT, and creator of BioBuilder.org, an online learning resource about synthetic biology. Natalie began her science career as a microbiologist and her interest in education led her to MIT where she currently develops curriculum and teaches. With funding from the NSF, Natalie created BioBuilder, an online resource for both teachers and students to provide them with reliable instructional material about the fairly new science of synthetic biology. BioBuilder features short animated primers that explain the basics of gene expression as well as some basic technical bioengineering tools. This information is combined into teachable activities that explore how scientists can control the genes of microorganisms to either enable new discoveries or to construct useful new biological systems. As part of the NSF-funded engineering research center known as SynBERC, BioBuilder offers accessible, easy-to-use, and easy-to-learn-from material that is appropriate for both high school and college classrooms. Welcome, Natalie.
NATALIE KULDELL: It's great to be talking to you.
MIKO: Thank you for joining us. So tell us why did you create BioBuilder?
KULDELL: Well, let's see, I had been using synthetic biology in my classes at MIT to teach my students both the scientific ideas that they needed for bioengineering as well as some of the engineering principles, and I really liked the way that worked. So my students, as they were trying to design new systems or redesign existing ones, had to understand both the basic biology — things like enzymes and genetic control — but also had to work through the design and construction plans of their systems and synthetic biology really seemed to lend itself to those kinds of learning. So now, BioBuilder started when it was folks outside my classroom who heard about my teaching and grew really interested in this topic and wanted to learn about it. So it's interesting that synthetic biology does draw a lot of people into the field. They're interested, I think, because it's interdisciplinary, but also because there are some concerns and misunderstandings around it. So BioBuilder was my solution to trying to help people who might be expert in one thing learn the basics about something else. So for example, the policymakers who would come to me wanting to know about biology or maybe the biologist wanting to learn some engineering. So my initial idea was that BioBuilder could be an open website where anyone who was interested in synthetic biology could learn from.
MIKO: How did you create it? You already have a full-time job. So what resources were you able to assemble and how did you actually make it happen?
KULDELL: Yeah, my teaching at MIT keeps me busy for sure. But the National Science Foundation funded an engineering research center for synthetic biology, and with that funding, it really felt like I had an opportunity to work on something that was a little beyond the norm, something that could reach a broader community. So at that time, BioBuilder was leveraging the success of a comic strip that had appeared in Nature. It was in 2005 and that comic strip was called Adventures in Synthetic Biology. It drew a lot of attention to this new field and it was also trying to teach—
MIKO: Who made the comic? I'm just curious, who made the comic?
KULDELL: My colleagues Drew Endy, Isadora Deese here at MIT, and the Synthetic Biology Working Group that we have here at MIT. The comic was really successful in many ways, but we also found that it was hard for real newcomers to the field to understand all of it. And so, our next thought was that we could scaffold the material a little bit more, maybe break it down into smaller single-page comic strips and activities that people could do, and that would keep the content both interesting and entertaining but could also educate a broader community. So as you mentioned, I had wonderful colleagues working on this with me, including Drew Endy, who's now at Stanford University, but also had some wonderful high school teacher working with me. He's from Sharon, Massachusetts, named Jim Dixon and a great animation company in New York.
MIKO: So tell us more about how BioBuilder is organized. How can someone, once they get there, how can they use it?
KULDELL: So the site is fully open access and will always be that way. It's built for both teachers and students. Right now if you go to the site, you would find some hands-on laboratory activities that connect the science and engineering standards that most high schools have to meet or maybe could be suitable for biotechnology lab class or some early college-level laboratory class. There are also some classroom activities that don't require laboratory space. Those are focused on bioethics or biodesign. But the site is really modular, so there's no order, prescribed order, to the content that's there and no set number that needed to be, would need to be complete. So if you were a student, you could go, you could watch the animations and learn from them. You could engage in the activities, answer some of the questions. There's also a place to submit your data. If you were a teacher coming to the site, you could find some resources for preparing the reagents, grading rubrics, some sample data if you wanted to compare your class data to other data that's available, and see, there's also a forum, a discussion forum so teachers can share information with one another about how things are going.
MIKO: I took a look at some of the animations and I was impressed with the personalities that you ascribe to certain people, like the teacher, the lab person, and the student in the lab. Can you tell me a little bit about how you came to those kind of characterizations and what the creative process was for that?
KULDELL: Yeah, that's a collaborative process that we've come to over a time. I've really enjoyed how the characters have evolved. We've tried to sort of draw in a curious student and somebody who's a little expert in science and another person who's more expert in engineering, and I think the interactions really speak to the community and the necessary collaboration that has to occur in this field.
MIKO: I liked particularly the personality traits that you ascribe to some of the folks in the lab. I think a lot of scientists will see it a very familiar set of people in those interactions, and you make it kind of fun. You make it interesting and familiar, but you also make it fun. This seems like a new way to approach teaching, and I'm curious. It starts from an application-based sensibility and it sort of addresses why we should care or how can we use aspects of science. And it's a natural question for a graduate engineering student, but not really so natural for high schoolers or intro biology students. So how does BioBuilder fit into the current and future landscape of science learning do you think, as far as making science more accessible to broader audiences?
KULDELL: Yeah. For me, the real heart and fun of doing science is the investigation and the actual practice of it. So I would love in the future to see more teaching being done through the investigation of some good existing examples and through asking students to become participants and engage with the content directly. A lot of teaching and certainly some of what I had when I was coming through the ranks was teaching around technical aspects of what you can do. But really, techniques change so much over time, it really doesn't feel like there's a lot of usefulness in teaching just techniques. And then, in terms of just knowledge and direct content, that's so discoverable through Wikipedia and through any Internet search. So the message I would love to have students take away from this and other parts of their learning is that what they think really matters, that they need to engage with the content, not just as technicians about it but actual thinking members of a community. So if they do that, they could approach the material with a lot of enthusiasm and we'd expect them to approach it with thoughtfulness. People, maybe given how they've learned science or thought about it, don't really have a good feeling. Many people don't have a good feeling about what it is to be a scientist and don't really get engineering. But people can be just brilliant at it if they're given the room to make some discoveries and make some mistakes and maybe just make some choices about what it is they want to study. I mean, who wouldn't want to do that, right?
MIKO: Yeah. Do you think that BioBuilder and synthetic biology in particular, these kinds of approaches, do you think they serve a larger purpose of informing maybe not just students but the public about things like synthetic biology? Can you talk a little bit about some of the concerns that the public might have about synthetic biology and what a site like this can do to help rectify some of those negative images that the field sometimes has?
KULDELL: Right. So I'm actually in New York teaching at a community lab space some of the BioBuilder content and yesterday I got to teach an artist who was interested in working with biology and a physics undergraduate student and somebody who hadn't been in a lab for thirty years, but was a biology major in college. I think there are a lot of people who find interest and sort of a tantalizing aspect to biology, sort of see it as the future direction for solving many problems. But there is a fear that it inspires as well, that we don't really know what we're doing, that we're overreaching and not considering the impact of what we do. So I think that by actually trying some of the content and making it open and accessible, not only does it convey the notion that this is a community working hard at this, but also it really drives home the limitations of what we are able to do at this point, that much of the hype around synthetic biology talks about a future that is far off and hard to imagine and that what we have in hand right now is far more humble.
MIKO: Thanks for telling us about all of this today, BioBuilder and the way it actually is crafted to help us understand synthetic biology in a new way, and hopefully, attract lots of different audiences to the field. Thanks, Natalie.
KULDELL: Thanks for giving me the chance.
MIKO: Thank you for listening to this edition of NatureEdCast. You can find this podcast and others at nature.com/scitable. That's Nature.com/s-c-i-t-a-b-l-e. Please join us again next time.
