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Academic Perspectives/Panel Discussion

Moderator: Douglas A. Lauffenburger
James Cassatt Leroy Hood H. Steven Wiley Huntington Willard Marc W. Kirschner George Poste Matthew P. Scott Peter Sorger David Botstein: January 9, 2004; Running Time: 1:03:13

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

In this wide-ranging discussion, panelists seized on redesigning science education as a way of ensuring the success of systems biology. The first challenge lies in improving instruction in the earliest years. David Botstein said, “K-12 education has never been that great…(kids) don’t need to know everything in excruciating detail….Anything they find out by themselves is worth 10 or 20 of anything you tell them to do." Mark Kirschner remarked, “What’s left out is appropriate kinds of inquiry, and at the appropriate age.” Leroy Hood spoke with master teachers and “understood that the worst way to teach was lecture.” Another obstacle lies with the culture of higher education, where scientists are rewarded for focusing on a single specialty and for research, not teaching. George Poste pointed to “rampant egotism that’s destructive,” preventing collaboration. Peter Sorger commented, “Autonomy is given to faculty members in classroom. We need expectations. Students will gravitate to those courses that are taught well.” A major hurdle for budding systems biologists involves embracing a larger biology. Matt Scott spoke of building “excitement about things beautiful and mysterious.” Other panelists expressed hope that the diversity of living things would generate a passion not only to understand the fundamental interdependence among all living things but to preserve species as well.

Lecture Details

Location: Wong Auditorium

“The biggest bad thing about molecular biology and the genome is detail orientation. We have all descended into the weeds.”

David Botstein

About the Speakers

Moderator: Douglas A. Lauffenburger

Ford Professor and Head of the Department of Biological Engineering, and Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biology, MIT

Douglas A. Lauffenburger is also director of MIT's Division of Biological Engineering, and is Uncas & Helen Whitaker Professor of Bioengineering and Chemical Engineering. He is also a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

Lauffenburger received his B.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois in 1975, and his Ph.D.in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1979.

Lauffenburger serves as director of the Biotechnology Process Engineering Center, and sits on the Executive Committee, MIT Computational and Systems Biology Initiative (CSBi).

James Cassatt

Director, Division of Cell Biology and Biophysics Acting Director, Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Institutes of Health

Leroy Hood

President, Institute for Systems Biology

Dr. Hood has published more than 500 peer-reviewed papers, received 12 patents, and co-authored textbooks in biochemistry, immunology, molecular biology, and genetics, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the American Association of Arts and Sciences. He earned an M.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1964 and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1968. His professional career began at Caltech where he and his colleagues pioneered four instruments--the DNA gene sequence and synthesizer, and the protein synthesizer and sequencer--which comprise the technological foundation for contemporary molecular biology. Dr. Hood was also one of the key players in the Human Genome Project. In 1992, Dr. Hood moved to the University of Washington to create the cross-disciplinary Department of Molecular Biotechnology. In his role as the William Gates III Professor of Biomedical Science, Dr. Hood applied his laboratory expertise in DNA sequencing to the analysis of human and mouse immune receptors and initiated studies in prostate cancer, autoimmunity, and hematopoietic stem cell development. In 2000, Dr. Hood co-founded the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle.

H. Steven Wiley

Director, Biomolecular Systems
Pacific Northwest Labs

Huntington Willard

Director, Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy
Duke University

Marc W. Kirschner

Professor of Systems Biology
Harvard Medical School

George Poste

Director, Arizona Biodesign Institute
Arizona State University

Matthew P. Scott

Bio-X Program for Bioengineering, Biomedicine and Biosciences
Stanford University

Peter Sorger

Director, Computational and Systems Biology Initiative (CSBi), MIT Associate Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering,MIT

In addition to his position at CSBi, Peter Sorger also holds associate appointments at the MIT Center for Cancer Research and the Broad Institute. Sorger received his A.B. in Molecular Biology from Harvard in 1984, and his Ph.D. from Trinity College, Cambridge University, in 1993. He trained as a postdoctoral fellow with Harold Varmus and Andrew Murray at the University of California, San Francisco. Sorger's lab -- 19 graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and staff scientists -- is attempting to identify the molecular lesions that cause genomic instability, to determine their frequency in normal and cancerous cells and to develop improved means to kill selectively diseased tissues

David Botstein

Director and Anthony B. Evnin Professor of Genomics Lewis-Sigler Institute of Integrative Genomics, Princeton University

Botstein was educated at Harvard (A.B. 1963) and the University of Michigan (Ph.D. 1967). He joined the faculty of MIT in 1967 and developed an innovative series of undergraduate courses called "project labs," which emphasized current research questions and cutting-edge techniques. In 1987 he moved to Genentech, Inc. as Vice President – Science, and in 1990 he joined Stanford University’s School of Medicine, where he was Chairman of the Department of Genetics. In 2003 he became Director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute of Integrative Genomics at Princeton University.

Dr. Botstein's research has centered on genetics, especially the use of genetic methods to understand biological functions. In 1980, Botstein and three colleagues proposed a method for mapping genes that laid the groundwork for the Human Genome Project. Dr. Botstein was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1981 and to the Institute of Medicine in 1993. He has served on many policy-making and peer-review committees, including the NAS/NRC study on the Human Genome Project (1987-88), the NIH Program Advisory Panel on the Human Genome (1989-90) and the Advisory Council of the National Center for Human Genome Research (1990-1995).