Transcript of the Interview:
Harris (The Interviewer): Ok, it's recording now, hello Dr. C, I got a couple of questions for you regarding your academic career at Texas Wesleyan. The first question I have for you is what scientific change during the span of 2010 to 2020 was the most impactful to your teaching and how?
Dr. Chitra Chandrasekaran (The Interviewee): As far as teaching is concerned -- Harris, backing up the last question, what scientific discovery or general change in 2010? Because I realize I might be answering this wrong.
Harris: What kind of change...more scientific, the discoveries, the technologies, implements of different changes in the curriculum. How would that affect your teaching?
Dr. Chandrasekaran: I just wanted to make sure I understood, I think without question, things that totally changed the way we had to think of our curriculum and pedagogy was the fact that sequencing of genomes became so much more available and accessible. It went from being something esoteric to something you had to be doing at the undergraduate level, we had to expose you to this notion of the technique and all the applications that came from it. So, I think it would be genomics and sequencing and everything that comes from it.
Harris: Yeah, that correlates with what Dr. Clark said as well about the previous era so that's interesting. Alright, next question: what do you enjoy about teaching at Texas Wesleyan? What makes it special given your credentials?
Dr. Chandrasekaran: There are a couple of things: one is what everybody says, its a small class size, et cetera, which I do find incredibly important. Not sure--it would be a very different kind of feeling which I've gotten a taste of in the pandemic of not being able to see students and not being able to interact. It's definitely affected my teaching in a sort of negative way. I think that related to science being able to do independent research with students because I think that's where everything becomes much more real. It's not just study the syllabus and do what Dr. C or Dr. Clark says and see what happens in the course. We are coming up with independent questions, I don't know what's going to happen, the student doesn't know what's going to happen. It's really what attracted most of us into science in the first place. Truly, that's an important part of my pedagogy is engaging students in open-ended unique research opportunities and I try to shift that even to the classes where I can. But it definitely works better one on one in independent research courses.
Harris: Awesome, alright. Could you describe the scientific scene at that time of 2010 to 2020? What was the exciting prospect that you and your peers were really talking about?
Dr. Chandrasekaran: Oh, what were we talking about? We were talking about something called Omics at that time. It started with Genomics, which was looking at and comparing DNA sequences of genomes but then people extended it "oh we can do it with DNA, we should be able to with RNA. If we can do it with RNA then we can do it with proteins." We came up with an idea, not me personally, but this community came up with this idea for something called Systems Biology. That we don't look at genes acting individually, we look into them as a network. We don't look at proteins acting individually and we don't look at individuals acting individually either. I think that coupled with this huge increase in computational approaches to biology, some of it related to the genome, some of it wasn't. Some of it was improvements in microscopy techniques, the ability to visualize molecules in cells. Some of that technology just took off during that era and the types of manipulations we were seeing in the research world and the research field allowed 3D reconstruction of structures that people have never seen before had allowed us to estimate the origins of certain processes in ways that nobody could have done before without the computational ability. I remember in that era really having to be intentional, I never learned how to program but I really needed to know how to use research databases which are now commonplace. That really blew up in 2020, not just for DNA, it was for everything. Everything that I studied.
Harris: Alright, the next question that I have is what does the future look like, in your opinion, for science education in the coming decades? Given what's happened before and what's going on now.
Dr. Chandrasekaran: From the science side of things, it's like drinking from the proverbial fire hydrant. We just keep having this explosion of information and with that comes all the things we don't know. I think the COVID pandemic is a pretty good illustration of that, the emergence of the virus forced everyone to basically sit and think "what do we know right now and what can we do? Can we do it in a really fast way to control it?" I'd say the development of that particular kind of vaccine, the RNA vaccine, is a direct result of everything that I've been talking about. From a science side, there's so much. I think it's always been an issue with science education and it will continue to be, it's just that the issues will change is how science interacts with society. I think we always go through these periods of time where science pushes one way and society says "wait a minute, no, we don't believe it. We don't like it, it goes against our morality, it goes against this and that." I think as science progresses more and more, for example, there's a recent article in NPR detailing the formation of monkey-human chimeras which are a fused embryo. A decade ago, nobody would've even thought that one could do this and today someone did it, and now the scientific community and me as an educator is asking: should they have done it? What was the scientific basis assigned for it? What was it that we were supposed to learn? What doors does it open that maybe we wanted to leave closed? So that's what I think is going to be the big challenge for science education is this balancing act of promoting discovery but being responsible for it too. What does responsibility look like? That's something we as a society decide, I don't necessarily believe in restricting research but I admit that I read that article and went "well, that opens a lot of doors that people might have wanted to leave closed. So now what do we do? What do we do now that we opened that door?"
Harris: Yeah, it's interesting what I'm thinking about. This isn't part of the question but just curious. Do you think ethics halts science or guides science?
Dr. Chandrasekaran: It depends, It's very difficult. Ethics should guide science, let's put what should happen here. Scientists should be guided by ethics, ethics should be informed by science. It should be a nice partnership. But I think its people, groups of people who decide ethical structures and you always have to sort of contemplate, I'm not an ethicist per se, but I always think and have to evaluate background, motivations, one person's ethical decision on let's just say terminating pregnancy could look really different from someone else's. Both would say they are making the ethical decision but both are using a totally different rubric to get to totally different guides. I think there are things that mascarade as ethics that aren't. I think part of it though is, we've frankly done lip service to this, I really do think ethical discussions need to be brought in. We've struggled with this in the department, where do we put that in? When we do lab? When we do research? I'm teaching an upper-level course right now and the last section of it is about biotechnology and we are having the ethical discussions now because I think they have to happen. It's not that we are going to agree and I separate out the biology of the approach from whether it's ethical or not, depending on your point of view. I think it should work together, I think we can all agree that there are some things we ought not to do. It's just we don't actually agree on what those things are. There are some big global things that we all agree that would be a bad idea. But that's a hard one. I will say this, I would personally rather take the risk of opening the box and exploring then having the difficult discussions then to not open the box, to decide that I don't want to pursue knowledge because I'm scared of what it could bring does strike me as being very anti-science. I think its a struggle that most scientists, especially if they are working in areas that have strong ethical implications for their work.
Harris: Well, a very interesting topic about ethics and its relation to science. More and more, as we go on to the future, things are more and more possible. Its important to keep a sight on ethics. Because just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it. Back to the questions track, which is pretty much all I had for you. Is there anything you would like to say to students potentially listening to this interview? Is there any words of advice or something you would like to say?
Dr. Chandrasekaran: I really love this project, being able to look at science education as a historical measure. I think it used to be the way that science was taught and for some people, it still is like, "OK, there were these people running around and they did this." I think understanding, in fact, that's how I'm doing with biotechnology lectures is because not only do you see the evolution of the process of science, you also see how society has moved to either accept, embrace, or not. I think it's going to be sort of fascinating, I don't know who you've talked to if they were active in teaching 10-20 years ago before me they might have a really different perspective on pedagogy, how we approach the discipline. Right now, my approach to teaching biology is that having you guys memorize every single fact that is known, I can't do it so I can't expect you to do it. So we started looking at it differently, we started looking at it as themes or examples or cases. I think moving forward if I were to say anything to people listening here and you are interested in pursuing careers in science, I guess what I would say as not a failing but something I wish I would've been able to see into the future was to learn a little bit more about computers. I think database analysis isn't going away, it's going to be even more entrenched, it's going to be a requirement to know how to program and do some of these things if you are interested in a science career. Even if it's "just teaching," you need to know it as well. So, that's my curiosity looking into the future is how much will AI affect database recognition and predictions. How much will smart learning or machine learning or whatever its called affect some of these processes so that's the curiosity that I have looking forward.
Harris: Alright! Well, I know your busy so I'm going to let you go. Thank you for getting some time out of your schedule to do this. I appreciate it.
Dr. Chandrasekaran: Is it possible that I get to see the final product of all of this?
Harris: Yeah! I'm going to get finished real soon and I'll hand it off to Dr. Battles, she'll publish it somewhere.
Dr. Chandrasekaran: Ok, let me know. I'd love to see it and how this fits in with the entirety of what you've done. I think its really interesting what you are doing here.
Harris: Thank you. I'll stop recording...