Science for me and YouTube

My daughter is studying biology in high school, and her experience is both amazingly like and amazingly unlike mine at her age.

The amazingly unlike part isn’t hard to figure out. My old biology textbook doesn’t mention recombinant DNA, which had barely been invented. My daughter lives in a world in which the human genome has always been sequenced, sheep have always been cloned, and a certain number of your friends have entered this world via in vitro fertilization.

Select videos featuring Whitehead research Whitehead 2007 Learn what makes the Institute unique.  [220k QuickTIme video]   Video length: 7:16 Using stem cells to understand disease Features Richard Young and Rudolf Jaenisch From Technology Review March 2006  [View video] Video length: 6:05 Visit our gallery for more videos.

What’s amazingly like is how she’s learning: teacher, textbook and a little time in the lab. Oh, her biology teacher is fond of educational websites, but those aren’t terribly important in class (yet).

However dramatically medicine has changed in my lifetime, that’s nothing compared to what she’ll see. As both a medical consumer and citizen, she’ll need to understand the strengths and limitations of the major advances now lurking just over the horizon.

But I don’t think she’ll spend much time reading about them in print.

We still get print newspapers, news magazines and science publications delivered at home. My daughter rarely reads any of them.

What she does, like her friends (and her parents), is spend time on the Web. Lots of time. The Web will be her main channel for tracking the future of biomedicine, as it will be for so many other topics.

And when she can, she’ll be watching videos on the Web.

For years, Whitehead has been filming our principal investigators as they give lectures to our non-scientific staff, and posting those films in our Web gallery.

But, as everyone knows, the popularity of Web videos is soaring now with the combination of powerful PCs, fast Internet connections, inexpensive digital video hardware and software, and Web video aggregators.

That’s excellent news for public understanding of biology. Along with the extraordinary power and promise of today’s research comes extraordinary complexity. The popularity of Web videos gives us new ways to dive through all those details to learn about today’s biomedical research.

Enjoy an animation of proteins doing their dances together, and suddenly you understand the basic concept. Watch a researcher explain what her lab studies, and it becomes clear. Show students a postdoc describing how he got excited about his field, and you can inspire them too.

What’s really new is that people don’t have to wander across your Web site to find this great stuff. Today, for instance, YouTube’s most famous science video shows the startling results of dropping a Mentos mint into a bottle of Diet Coke. But the video aggregation website also is becoming a major resource for high school teachers swapping classroom videos.

So we at Whitehead and our colleagues at other research institutions will be expanding our use of video, along with podcasts and other Web goodies. It’s another way for our scientists to tell their stories—and sometimes, my daughter and her peers will tune in.