The inner life of a cell is an educational video from the BioVisions Project at Harvard University. I don’t know anything about Leukocyte Extravasation or Molecular Cell Biology in general, so I looked up words that I didn’t know.
Chemokines are a family of structurally related glycoproteins with potent leukocyte activation and/or chemotactic activity.
Great, now I have more words to look up, but when you don’t even know the terms, the whole thing sounds like this.
Remember learning science through tedious textbooks and slideshows? Those days are over, at least for Harvard students studying molecular and cellular biology. Today, these Harvard students can explore the microscopic world of a cell through 3D animation, enhancing traditional textbook learning. Using LightWave, John Liebler of XVIVO Scientific Animation created the 3D animation short, The Inner Life of a Cell, at the request of Harvard University.
Losick’s own Biological Sciences 52, “Introductory Molecular Biology,” puts a premium on interaction and engagement. He’s used part of his HHMI grant to hire a graphic artist, Matt Bohan, to make dynamic computer animations of molecular processes. These are ideally suited for teaching molecular biology, he says, because they let him show how several distinct processes-like the unzipping of a DNA strand and the pairing of its bases-work together. “If you’re trying to teach something that is dynamic on a blackboard, it’s hard to do,” he explains. “With an animation, I can show things in motion, and also I can layer.”
The bottom line is this: It’s the illustrations that help me make the leap from not caring about molecular biology, to being curious and in turn learning something about how life works at the molecular level.
