Genetic Engineering Proposal Project

As you consider a career as a biologist it is vital that you recognize what it is that biologists do. It would be understandable if you thought your primary goal as a biologist-in-training is to master a large body of facts – to become encyclopedically informed about what biologists have learned over the years. It would also be understandable if you thought that learning the wide array of laboratory techniques should be your objective. While both of these are worthy objectives, they are arguably should not be your primary objective. Rather, you should aspire to learn to think like a biologist, to see the world around you and ask what you can do to understand it more clearly and to make a contribution of insight or technology to the current state of the art, to the body of knowledge and biotechnology of this era.

While we, as instructors in this course, could try to convey this biological thought process to you in lecture or discussion, we think the most effective way is to give you a project that requires you to think like a biologist does. That we learn best by doing something ourselves and by communicating what we know to others is clear. Our challenge has been to create an experience that allows you exercise your creative, analytic, and expressive faculties. To this end we are asking each student in the course to work in teams to identify a hypothesis that they would like to test or a problem that they would like to solve that involves the creation of a genetically engineered organism.

You will choose the specific question or problem that interests you, select the gene and organism that you’d like to modify, find and present the background information needed to explain the rationale and justification for the work proposed, state the specific aims of your project and a plan to achieve those aims, explore issues of safety, ethics, and efficacy presented by your project, and work collaboratively to generate both a written proposal and a graphical / oral version of your genetic engineering proposal. 

In the course of completing this semester-long project you will work independently, collaboratively with members of your group and with others in the class, and receive detailed written feedback from us, your instructors. You will have opportunities to dissect a research proposal, explore the scientific literature, evaluate and you’re information sources, brainstorm, analyze data, evaluate the merits of alternative aims and approaches, provide constructive criticism and meaningful feedback to others, selectively incorporate the suggestions of others, and present your ideas in a logical and articulate way. You will make and give effective visual and oral presentations of your proposal and evaluate the effectiveness of the proposals of your classmates.

This project will require about 30-35% of our class time as well as many additional hours of your time outside of class. Why do we devote such a large amount of time to this project when we could use that same amount of time instead for lecture? Simply because the cognitive skills that you have the opportunity to develop by pursuing this project will be longer lasting and more valuable than the facts that we could tell you.