STEM (Science,Technology,Engineering,& Math) education in USA, The initiative, The interest, The action.

STEM Education in United States 

Image credit : Shyam's Imagination Library

STEM (Science Technology Engineering & Math) education has again come into limelight suddenly with everyone concerned including White House taking initiatives in this direction.

I very vividly remember almost a year back in 2009 when this issue was raised by my favorite author, Harvard professor and former editor of HBR Prof. Rosabeth Moss Kanter. She raised this issue in one of her articles during her India visit to attend Nasscom seminar. She said

“America will create new jobs by tapping the inventiveness of entrepreneurs who can draw on a large pool of talent with so-called STEM skills – science, technology, engineering, and math. I wish that the federal stimulus package included less money on banks and more on investment in higher education and companies of the future.”

Nice words spoken, but no concrete action in that direction. A typical case of ‘intent and action’ going in opposite directions. Industry at least seemed happy building their empires outside United States ‘CISCO’ CEO John Chambers prided in his Indian talent acquisition. He said at same conference.

“Cisco CEO John Chambers, with his usual charm, repeated his company’s investment in Bangalore as its second global headquarters because of the 600,000 engineers a year that India produces.”

Is it a preference of convenience over construction? 

STEM education is a huge construction work involving the Government the industry and the intelligentsia. Till now none of them seemed to have taken it seriously.

It however is a happy augury that people have suddenly realized the importance of it. Let us hope this new found enthusiasm results in some concrete action being taken in this direction.

However the implementation of STEM is not as easy as people think. For the student perspective to change, it is essential that the changes are brought in the teacher perspective, the parent perspective, and teaching institutions perspective.

The role of Institutions

The institutions need to make the science curriculum more down to earth. It should be relevant and related to day to day applications. The indifference to science & math should in a gradual process transformed in to interest, love and finally to passion. A sufficient dose of practicals, puzzles, & games could help, but more importantly it should be related to the happenings and applications around us.

The natural affinities

Another reality that parents & the teaching community should take note of is that if one scores less in math & science, it is not the student who needs too be blamed. It has to be understood that, Science, Math, humanities learning are related to different but overlapping functions of the brain. Each individual has a circuit naturally designed for a particular stream and a profession. The Bio-individuality of Human beings needs to be respected. This has been proved by many neurophysiologic studies and has strong empirical evidence in its support.

However on the positive side is the Neuro-plasticity, which states that every one can learn, only thing is some of us just need to be Re-Booted. More often than not, it requires that we start from the ground up

The quotients IQ, EQ & PQ

STEM education is just not the case of IQ (Intelligence Quotient). It also involves EQ (Emotional Quotient), & PQ (Physical Quotient).

First factor is the PQ. The physical ability to learn, which includes the ability to hear, see, feel, move, and have the energy they need to learn.

Second factor is the EQ. Children need the right attitude to be able to learn. Without a good attitude learning becomes almost impossible. EQ includes attitudes about themselves, others, their work and the future.

Last but not the least is the IQ. The cognitive ability to learn which includes the ability to attend, understand, imbibe, process, recall & reproduce when required.

Pedagogy & Content connection:

There needs to be a symbiotic co-existence between the pedagogy & the content. “The Process & the Produce”. Iteration is an important prerequisite in any teaching process, more so in STEM education. The second most important requirement is for the teaching to come out of its linear mindset. A non linear spiral process could be a better alternative.

The faculty and the Involvement

The whole above process can be accentuated or negated by the most important factor, the faculty and its involvement. What is needed is, informed teachers, who are passionate about the subject and who show how the content is relevant to the real world. Strategies and gimmicks are secondary. 

We need strategies that allow students to write, discuss, create visual representations, and organize concepts meaningfully. The majority of students coming through public education are not naturally doing this. Strong learners are. But we need far more teachers teaching kids how to think than ever before.

 I would like to see more about the connections between content and active learning.

Let us hope that the initiatives taken by the Government and intellectuals transform themselves into concrete action plans which are implemented with all sincerity &  in not so distant future, United States starts producing sufficient number of STEM graduates.

 Let us toast to the bright future of United States of America

Shyam


Please also read Shyam's article on WikiHow


 "How to Impart STEM education to your children"


This article article was featured on wikiHow home page

New drug discovered for Hepatitis C

Potential new class of drugs to combat hepatitis C identified by scientists

BY BRUCE GOLDMAN
description of photo

Jeffrey Glenn

Stanford University School of Medicine scientists have discovered a novel class of compounds that, in experiments in vitro, inhibit replication of the virus responsible for hepatitis C. If these compounds prove effective in infected humans as well, they may dramatically accelerate efforts to confront this virus’s propensity to rapidly acquire drug resistance, while possibly skirting some of the troubling side effects common among therapies in current use and in late-stage development.

“Hepatitis C virus, or HCV, is a huge problem,” said Jeffrey Glenn, MD, PhD, associate professor of gastroenterology and hepatology, and director of Stanford’s Center for Hepatitis and Liver Tissue Engineering. “It infects over 150 million people worldwide, many of whom don’t even know they have it. Chronic hepatitis C infection is the No. 1 cause of liver cancer and liver transplantation in the United States.”

Current treatments for hepatitis C, Glenn said, are only somewhat effective and often toxic. And designing a new antiviral agent is difficult, because a virus thrives by commandeering a host cell’s own essential functions.

There are many effective drugs for diseases caused by bacteria. Bacterial cells, like our own, are fully functioning units. But they differ from mammalian cells in ways that make it feasible for them to be attacked with drugs that mostly leave our own cells alone. Antibiotics, which fight bacterial infections, have revolutionized the treatment of contagious disease.
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Designing a clean antiviral drug is another story. Unlike bacteria, which multiply by dividing, a virus reproduces by breaking into cells and diverting their manufacturing machinery to produce copies of itself, which eventually depart the ravaged cell to find and exploit fresh ones.

HCV is an especially tough nut to crack. Natural isolates of it can’t be grown in culture as can many other viruses, which seriously impedes drug and vaccine research. (There is still no vaccine for hepatitis C.) In recent years, virologists have developed surrogate systems that substantially duplicate the HCV replication process. These systems can be used to test compounds for effectiveness against the virus.

But even when a compound shows effectiveness, HCV mutates readily. So it can rapidly acquire drug resistance. The ultimate solution, Glenn said, is probably to “attack the virus from multiple angles all at the same time with a cocktail of compounds,” each targeting a different item in the virus’s toolkit. “It’s imperative to identify new classes of potential drugs.”

Glenn is the senior author of a study, which appeared online Jan. 20 in Science Translational Medicine, in which he and his colleagues found a brand-new class of compounds capable of disrupting the HCV replication cycle. (The study’s first author is Nam-Joon Cho, a postdoctoral scholar in Glenn’s laboratory.) Importantly, the identified compounds do this by interfering with a virus-initiated activity that, while critical to viral replication, doesn’t ordinarily occur in uninfected cells. This, Glenn said, offers the prospect of inhibiting this activity — and stopping viral replication in its tracks — with little or no toxicity to human cells.

Animal cells are composed mainly of water and water-soluble substances, enclosed within a fatty outer membrane and segregated into distinct subcellular compartments by internal membranes. HCV replicates only in association with such membranes. While some viruses cozy up to membranes that already exist inside living cells, HCV highjacks bits and pieces of membranes and assembles them into large clusters of tiny nested bubbles, or vesicles. The clusters are unlike anything found in a normal human cell.

Glenn and his associates identified a cylinder-shaped chunk of an HCV-encoded protein that is essential for that protein’s known vesicle-aggregating activity. A synthetic version of this cylindrical section caused vesicles to aggregate into telltale clusters. The investigators then used this finding to attack the virus: they found that mutations in the synthesized segment destroyed the virus’s ability to replicate.

While that insight was important, it alone did not translate into a therapy. “You can’t treat a patient that way — by going in, removing all the viruses, mutating them and putting them back in,” Glenn said.

Instead, the researchers set out to detect compounds that could prevent this key protein segment from working. They designed an assay consisting of hundreds of separate tiny depressions in a plastic laboratory dish, with each depression housing large numbers of individual tiny vesicles in solution. As expected, sprinkling some of the synthesized protein segment into a depression caused the vesicles inside to clump together. But laborious testing of numerous off-the-shelf compounds — a different one in each well — showed that some prevented the aggregation from happening. Two of these compounds pronouncedly impaired HCV’s ability to reproduce itself in the workhorse surrogate HCV replication system.

Glenn foresees a year to 18 months of extensive preclinical and animal testing before this class of compounds could gain approval by the Food and Drug Administration to enter all-important clinical trials in humans. Because the compounds operate by disrupting a mechanism that is only needed by the virus, he said, he hopes the drugs based on them may exhibit both viral replication-suppressing ability and a favorable toxicity profile.

The study was funded by Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the National Institutes of Health and the Stanford University CTSA and SPARK programs. Other Stanford study co-authors were Hadas Dvory-Sobol, PhD, Choongho Lee, PhD, Paul Bryson, PhD, Marilyn Masek and Menashe Elazar, PhD, of Glenn’s laboratory; and Curtis Frank, PhD, the W.M. Keck, Sr. Professor in engineering and professor of chemical engineering. Cho, Dvory-Sobol, Lee, and Glenn have equity interests in Eiger Bio-Pharmaceuticals Inc., a privately held, Palo Alto-based start-up to which Stanford has licensed intellectual property relevant to the new compounds.