Week 7 Preclass

Week 7: Project

Week-7 is about the group project. There are two goals for this week:

Goal-1 Help you select your project’s topic. If you make a good decision, then the rest of your project work will also be pretty good!

Goal-2 Enable you with three skills that are needed for an excellent project. These skills are tools for “communicating,” “storytelling,” and “performing.”

Postclass for Monday

Some advice about writing.

(Written by: Michael Specter.)

The first rules of writing about science are the first rules of any writing: Be clear; be brief; be simple.

Say what you have to say in as few words as possible. Then say something else. Simplicity does not imply stupidity any more than repetitive prose draped in fancy adjectives implies intelligence.

The most important information in the world is worth nothing if nobody reads it. If you are a scientist who cannot explain technical work to people who are not steeped in the technology they will stop reading. And you will have lost them.

Students often seem to think that prose is better when it is crammed with superlatives, laden with terms that only a few hundred people will understand, and then packed into verbal cul-de sacs. (This is just as true of students in the humanities as it is of those who major in scientific subjects.)

That is REALLY not the case. It is never EVER the case. By the way, the words in all caps are useless and their presence makes each of those sentences weaker. Nothing on earth is “very” unique.

Unless you are writing about religious dogma, the phrases “I think” and “I believe” are meaningless crutches. If you doubt me, give it a try.

Drop one of those phrases into a sentence, as in: I believe this professor is a pedant. Or: I think the writer is full of himself. The terms are not only useless, they weaken they point you are trying to make. Retire them.

If you write that data is unbelievably valuable, that means it’s worthless. Nor is data ever “incredibly” interesting or “absolutely” essential. Be a reader’s friend, not an obstacle. If you don’t need a word don’t use it.

Many successful academics, including people who teach at places like Stanford and Harvard, write in language that seems chosen to obfuscate rather than to illuminate. I have never understood why.

Somewhere along the line, though, a lot of academic writing became obscure, confusing and prolix. I know that because I have spent a good deal of my life trying to translate it into English for readers of The New Yorker. (There are obviously MANY exceptions at universities everywhere. And some of the best science writers are, or were, scientists: Richard Dawkins; Lewis Thomas; Oliver Sacks, Carl Sagan. This is a somewhat random list. There are many others.)

Your goal is to make what you write understandable. Nothing else matters nearly as much. One suggestion: read what you have done out loud. Even if only to yourself. I always do. Does each sentence matter? Does it sound confusing? Are there words that add nothing? Is it repetitious? If so, delete with abandon. The best writing is rewriting. But you have to get the ore out of the ground before you can extract the gem. If you saw my rough drafts you would laugh but my editors never do. Because they know a first draft is a beginning. Only a beginning.

Goals of your final project:

A few words about narrative structure and this project: for the purposes of your project think of a play as a box or a filing cabinet with, in this case, three sections. You can put whatever you want into that box as long as it is driven by a narrative that takes the reader on a journey with you. We want you to do it in three acts and we have given you the outlines of that journey:

Act 1) You are in the future. Wow. How great is it now that we have your chosen tool working in 2030?
Act 2) Nobody achieves greatness without crises (and failures) along the way. What were yours? Did they change your approach, your outcome, your goals?
Act 3) Finally, how did you get where you were going? What were the big achievements and how did you navigate? How did your perspective change once you got your hands dirty and started to build this tool?

Focus on the scientific evidence you need to show how you accomplished your goal by the end of this decade. That is critical. A play (or a book, or movie) is simply a device that lets you put that information into a digestible package. An essential part of your job, as scientists and bioengineers in the future, will be to communicate the value and purpose of your work to people who do not understand it. This project should help you do that.

Why not just ask for a powerpoint presentation or something more conventional? Powerpoint presentations are dull, and even when they are thoughtful they are conventional. We are not looking for convention. Try something new, different, even (intellectually) dangerous. This is not only a challenge. It ought to be fun. Weird is good. Nobody changes the world by moving two inches to one side or the other. You will not be penalized for taking a risk.

Making it easy to understand complicated ideas.

This is the hardest part of my job as a writer. By far. But it is also the most rewarding. Below I have included a few examples of the more complicated terms I have had to explain in stories for The New Yorker. They are not perfect, and you can probably find others that are as good or better. But this is just to give you an idea how one writer tries to make smart, non-technical people, pay attention to complicated ideas. Read a few or all or none. If you have questions about anything in this memo I will be happy to answer them.

Example-1: Viruses

Viruses reproduce rapidly and often with violent results, yet they are so rudimentary that many scientists don’t even consider them to be alive. A virus is nothing more than a few strands of genetic material wrapped in a package of protein—a parasite, unable to function on its own. In order to survive, it must ﬁnd a cell to infect. Only then can any virus make use of its single talent, which is to take control of a host’s cellular machinery and use it to churn out thousands of copies of itself. These viruses then move from one cell to the next, transforming each new host into a factory that makes even more virus. In this way, one infected cell soon becomes billions.

Example-2: What on earth is an endogenous retrovirus? And why do we care?

It takes less than two per cent of our genome to create all the proteins necessary for us to live. Eight per cent, however, is composed of broken and disabled retroviruses, which, millions of years ago, managed to embed themselves in the DNA of our ancestors. They are called endogenous retroviruses, because once they infect the DNA of a species they become part of that species. One by one, though, after molecular battles that raged for thousands of generations, they have been defeated by evolution. Like dinosaur bones, these viral fragments are fossils. Instead of having been buried in sand, they reside within each of us, carrying a record that goes back millions of years.

Example-3: What is so great about DNA?

The rungs of the ladder of human DNA consist of three billion pairs of nucleotides spread across forty-six chromosomes. The sequences of those nucleotides determine how each person diﬀers from another, and from all other living things.

Example-4: This CRISPR thing. Why the fuss?

CRISPR is a strange cluster of DNA sequences that can recognize invading viruses, dispatch a special enzyme to chop them into pieces, and use the viral shards that remain to form a rudimentary immune system. The sequences, identical strings of nucleotides that could be read the same way backward and forward, look like Morse code, a series of dashes punctuated by an occasional dot.

CRISPR has two components. The ﬁrst is essentially a cellular scalpel that cuts DNA. The other consists of RNA, the molecule most often used to transmit biological information throughout the genome. It serves as a guide, leading the scalpel on a search past thousands of genes until it ﬁnds and ﬁxes itself to the precise string of nucleotides it needs to cut.

Scientists took the ﬁrst serious step toward controlling our genes in the early nineteen-seventies, when they learned to cut chains of DNA by using proteins called restriction enzymes. Suddenly, genes from organisms that would never have been able to mate in nature could be combined in the laboratory. But those initial tools were more hatchet than scalpel, and, because they could recognize only short stretches within the vast universe of the human genome, the editing was rarely precise. (Imagine searching through all of Shakespeare for Hamlet’s soliloquy on suicide, relying solely on the phrase “to be.” You’d ﬁnd the passage, but only after landing on several hundred others.)

Example-5: What is a microbiome?

We inherit every one of our genes, but we leave the womb without a single microbe. As we pass through our mother’s birth canal, we begin to attract entire colonies of bacteria. By the time a child can crawl, he has been blanketed by an enormous, unseen cloud of microorganisms—a hundred trillion or more. They are bacteria, mostly, but also viruses and fungi (including a variety of yeasts), and they come at us from all directions: other people, food, furniture, clothing, cars, buildings, trees, pets, even the air we breathe. They congregate in our digestive systems and our mouths, ﬁll the space between our teeth, cover our skin, and line our throats. We are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species; these cells outnumber those which we consider our own by ten to one, and weigh, all told, about three pounds—the same as our brain. Together, they are referred to as our microbiome—and they play such a crucial role in our lives that some scientists have begun to reconsider what it means to be human.

Example-6: Why are we so susceptible to viruses from far away?

Deadly viruses have always threatened humanity, but a virus can travel only as far as the cells it infects. For most of human history, that wasn’t very far. A few hundred years ago, if H.I.V. had passed from an ape to a hunter, that person would have become sick and died. He might even have infected his entire village, killing everyone around him. But that would have been the end of it. There were no motorcycles to carry the infected carcasses of slaughtered apes to markets in Yaoundé, and, for that matter, no airplanes to ship them to Paris or New York. Forests had been impenetrable for thousands of years. In the past few decades, however, new roads, built largely by logging companies, have brought economic opportunity to millions of Africans, along with better medicine, clean water, and improved access to education. Yet, seen from the perspective of a virus, those roads, combined with air travel, have created another kind of opportunity, transforming humanity into one long chain of easily infected hosts—no less vulnerable in California than in Cameroon.

Preclass for Wednesday

Watch the free two-minute introductory video for Wednesday’s in-class guest, Malcolm Gladwell, here.

Next, ponder Kurt Vonnegut’s eight rules for writing fiction here.

Q.1. What do you think about Vonnegut’s rules?

Rule.8 states, ‘Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible.’

Q.2. How would you apply this rule in your written work (papers, essays)? How would you apply this rule in your presentations?

Extra reading-1: Kurt Vonnegut graphed the world’s most popular stories

Extra reading-2: How to write with style by Kurt Vonnegut

Preclass for Friday

Watch the video Mouse Trap - Cheese Advertisement start to finish.

Q.1. How many acts or chapters in this performance?

Q.2. What emotions do you experience specific to each chapter?

Q.3. What is the role of music (i.e., soundtrack) is setting your emotional state?

Q.4. How much dialog or text was used?

Next, watch Embrace Life - always wear your seat belt.

Complete the following “Story Spine” prompts to reveal the narrative structure for this performance.

-Once upon a time _____.

-Every day ___.

-But, one day ___.

-Because of that ____.

-Until, finally, ____.

-And, ever since then ____.

Extra-reading The Story Spine: Pixar’s 4th Rule of Storytelling and a Video to accompany the reading.

Please select and watch (minimum) one of the following videos: #24 Viral Monologues.

Q.5. What works in their video? What can be improved?

Inspirational Examples:

Note: Though these examples were not recorded on Zoom, feel free to use Zoom to record, or use your own software to mix audio/video!

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