Students reach molecular biology from a variety of sources, but what if we started them off from it instead? 

One of the most wonderful things about molecular biology is how empowering it is. Once you’ve learned about the central dogma, you become able to manipulate nucleic acids or proteins in hypothesis-driven ways that let you actively probe their functions – clone genes, tag molecules with fluorescent markers, engineer point mutations, and much, much more.

This empowerment is something that molecular biology shares with both chemistry and physics, whose students acquire agency very early on in their education. In chemistry, as soon as you’ve learned about the different elements you become able to create new compounds, or calculate the time it takes to boil a quantity of water; in physics you can build electrical circuits with predefined properties or predict the behaviour of projectiles. Similarly, in computer science, students can instruct machines to carry out tasks the moment they’ve mastered the basics of coding.  

This ability – to absorb a subject’s fundamentals and utilise them in novel ways, or to take what you’ve learned and leverage that knowledge to actually create something new – is an intoxicating property. It’s the difference between simply accumulating knowledge (by no means worthless in itself!) and being able to apply it. 

Curiously, this empowerment is something that tends to arrive much later in biology than it does in chemistry or physics. In biology, most of your early education is spent absorbing facts, usually starting at the whole-organism level, and with the molecular details of biochemistry, genetics, and the nucleic acid code coming later. 

In other words, the way we learn about biology is to go from the diversity of life (all those David Attenborough documentaries!) to the universality of life. People come to biology by learning about the natural world and the dazzling diversity of it before the revelation that all living things are actually related and can trace their lineage back to the last universal common ancestor. Conversely in chemistry or physics (or computer science you go from universality to diversity – you learn about the fundamental building blocks before you start exploring all the various ways they get used.

Could this be turned around for biology? Rather than going from diversity to universality, might it in fact be possible to structure education the other way around, and teach children about DNA first? What would happen if we started students off by teaching them about the information aspect of biology, before turning to the myriad ways in which that information gets applied? 

Truth is, you don’t necessarily need to understand the chemistry of life to grasp its informational aspect. There are 4 DNA bases, 2 DNA base pairs, a triplet code, and 20 amino acids. DNA makes RNA makes protein. You learn the triplet code, and you can learn how information flows from DNA into RNA and then into protein. You can learn from base pairing how DNA is transcribed into RNA (uridine can be left out at this stage, perhaps), and the 5’ to 3’ direction in which it’s made. You can even learn something of the properties of the 20 amino acids without needing to get too hung up on the chemistry – some are big, some are small, some like water and some don’t. If you change the DNA, you change the amino acid, and you change the protein’s properties. 

Once you understand that all life is based on the same code, you get – as Darwin famously glimpsed – a new and more profound appreciation of how interconnected life is. There is an extraordinary unity and togetherness of the natural world once you start seeing animals and plants as following radically different biological strategies but using the same fundamental building blocks to do so. And what remarkable and astounding diversity of forms, textures, sizes that brings about – a simple garden is suddenly transformed into something pulsatingly alive when you know that every blade of grass is photosynthesising, every spoonful of soil is teeming with microbes and matted with fungi, and each bird nestling inside a treetrunk is surrounded by tissues every bit as alive as it is.

What kind of perspective would children acquire, if we started them off in this way? How would they ultimately view life, and themselves, and the world around them it if they were to begin with DNA and work outwards from it?

Molecular biology has, famously, always been more of a destination than a departure point. It was founded by refugee physicists fleeing the horrors of World War II and to this day remains a melting pot of different scientific backgrounds and interests, but what if, what if there was a generation that came to it early?

Acknowledgements: The idea for this posting originally came from a conversation with GW. Image generated using MidJourney.