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There has been a growing reliance on the use of online tools to teach science to primary, secondary and college students. This makes sense because anybody who has pursued a science career will tell you that using web-based programs, applications and searches is absolutely essential when conducting scientific research. To that end, Amber Johnson at onlinecourses.org sent me an article that details some really cool educational add-on tools that are available for the Firefox browser.

I highly recommend that science educators at all levels check out the post and evaluate some of these interesting tools!

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Teaching!!!!!!!!

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The compensation packages for CEOs of many publicly held companies have recently, (for obvious reasons), come under intense scrutiny. This has spilled over to the chief executive offices of many not-for-profit organizations including private colleges and universities. While the compensation packages for most university presidents and administrators are substantial in many instances, there are a few university employees who sometimes earn substantially more. 

According to an article in today’s New York Times, there were 88 private-college employees who made $1 million or more in 2007 (only 11 were college Presidents or chief executive officers). These were the results from an analysis conducted by The Chronicles of Higher Education of the compensation packages of more than 4,000 employees at 600 private colleges. The two top earners were Pete Carroll, the head football coach at USC and Dr. David N. Silvers, a Columbia University dermatologist both of whom made almost $4.5 million last years. Coach Carroll’s compensation packages was almost four times that of the university’s president whereas Dr. Silver’s salary of $4,332,759 compared with $1 411,894 earned by Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia’s president. Another Columbia professor, Dr. Jeffrey W. Moses, earned a paltry $2,532,713 last year. Check out the salaries of the top ten earners!

While the pay for college and university presidents has risen sharply in the last decade the same hasn’t been true for many faculty members. Not surprisingly, over the same period, the gap between administrator and professor salaries has substantially widened. This parallels what has been taking place in the private sector where CEOs typically earn hundreds of times more than their employees. The disparity in administrator and faculty salaries led Patrick M. Callan, the president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education to muse: “It may be reasonable for these people to be well paid but if faculty’s getting 2 per cent raises, I don’t see why senior administrators, who are already high-paid, should get much larger increases. It reflects a set of values that is not the way most Americans think about higher education.” The Chronicle survey found that on average, university and college presidents make about $500,000 annually.

This poses an interesting question: Unlike administrators, are most university and college professors overpaid? Based on my own experience as a medical school faculty member—absolutely not! Nevertheless, over the 10 years or more, there has been a growing disparity in the salaries of research faculty members as compared with teaching faculty. Typically, the researchers, who bring in large sums of money from grants and other extramural funding, command much higher salaries than faculty members whose primary function is teaching. While this may seem reasonable from a financial/business perspective, it raises a fundamental question about higher education: What is more important—making money or teaching? 

Until next time…

Good Luck and Good Training!

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Convincing students and adults that science can be fun and even cool at times can be a very challenging proposition. This is mostly because science is perceived as “being hard” and in many cases, the people who teach science are not appropriately trained. Consequently sciences classes are frequently boring and unimaginative. Nevertheless, creative scientists can sometimes figure out ways to overcome these negative perceptions of science. One of the best examples of this is the use of the Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) in some so-called consumer products.  While this application of GFP may pose ethical dilemmas for some, I haven’t met many children or adults who don’t think that transgenic mice, fish or flowers that glow green, red, blue or yellow (or a combination of these colors) in dark aren’t cool! While this wasn’t GFP’s intended use—the scientists who first demonstrated GFP’s utility as a genetic engineering application won a Noble prize last year—it certainly exposed the lay public to wonders and powers of modern day scientists.

With this in mind, researchers at the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Industrial Science (IIS) announced that they had created a 5-millimeter tall doll composed of living cells to demonstrate a new method for fabricating three-dimensional living biological structures. The researchers created the tiny figurine by cultivating 100,000 cell capsules — 0.1-millimeter balls of collagen, each coated with dozens of skin cells — together inside a doll-shaped mold for one day. After the cells had fused to form the doll-shaped structure, it was placed in a culture solution and survived for more than 24 hours. The researchers hope to use the method to create tissues and organs with complex cellular structures, which may prove useful in the fields of regenerative medicine and drug development.

While this new technology may never rival GFP and its multitude of applications, it shows that scientists like to have fun from time-to-time and can introduce complex scientific ideas to the lay public.  In my opinion, many kids get turned off to science at an early age because we scientists take ourselves too seriously and rarely explore ways to inject fun into sometimes tedious and boring material. After all, nobody made it fun for us and we became scientists anyway! We live in a different world now and I can see from watching my own children grow, that today’s  kids today are inquisitive, creative, comfortable with sophisticated technologies and open to new ideas—requisite traits for all scientists!

Unlike the past eight years, a new window of opportunity exists to challenge and convince young people that science is fun and can be very cool at times. To accomplish this, we science educators must step outside of our comfort zones and begin to inject some fun and wonderment into science. The kids will love it and I suspect so will we!

Until next time…

Good Luck and Good Teaching!!!!!!!!!!

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I had little to do last night, so I decided to download Stumble Upon for Firefox.  While I was stumbling, I came across an outstanding video that teaches and reinforces the underlying principles of chemical reactions. If I had this type of tutorial when I was an undergraduate, I might very well have become a chemist rather than a biologist!

Until next time….

Good Luck and Good Reactions!!!!!!!

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This post was originally written by Vincent Racaniello, a long time friend and colleague, who runs the Virology Blog. 

Here is what Vincent had to say:

My colleagues (generally the older ones) often ask me why I blog or podcast. They believe that I am wasting my time. After all, I am a scientist, and it is my job to carry out research. In order to do this I must publish papers and obtain grants. The grant funds are used to pay salaries (mine and those in my laboratory) and purchase the supplies needed for research. In my institution, nothing matters except raising money for research. Teaching, mentoring, and other community services mean very little. Blogging and podcasting do nothing to help fund my laboratory.

Here are my answers. Why did I go into science? Because my parents (physician and teacher) and my teachers inspired me. But for many other children, the only inspiration they have is their teachers. They need input from other sources. I believe I can help provide that input over the internet.

Most people - kids, teens, adults - don’t understand science. Their teachers can provide only a very rudimentary, often flawed view of some of the fundamental concepts. While I cannot cover all of science, I can do a good job of teaching what I know. I have been studying and thinking about viruses for over 30 years, so I understand them quite well. I am also able to talk and write about them clearly and concisely, a gift I probably received in part from my teacher parent. These qualities put me in a unique position to educate the public about viruses. 

Early in my career, I didn’t think much about teaching. I focused on research. Later I realized I had a reasonable ability to communicate what I knew, which turned into a love of teaching. My blogging and podcasting about viruses represent part of the effort to impart some of my knowledge to the public. 

As I have read and heard many times on the web, if you want to blog or podcast, do it about something you are passionate about. And that is what I am doing.

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