Back-to-Science

DNA and Evolution with Dr. Jon Herron: my first science class in my college career

Before I start talking about my one and only science class, I'll orient myself. It's a Wednesday of week 8 in winter quarter 2023. Today I woke up at 8am to flurries of snow outside our balcony. My DNA and Evolution class meets twice a week in room 206 of Mary Gates Hall. I wanted to share some things we are up to in this class and some things I'm proud of so far.

One of the most challenging parts of this class for me was learning how to write for an audience of scientists. It's been since my senior year of high school that I took my last science class, which was over three years ago. I've grown so used to my language and social studies classes. When I got to my first day of DNA and Evolution, I truly think I forgot how to read a graph, much less design an experiment! It's been an adjustment getting back into the lingo and style of thinking like a scientist, but I've enjoyed it immensely.

Dr. Herron let us choose a book from his list and put us in reading groups. I've been reading A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution by Dr. Jennifer Doudna, one of the scientists who stumbled upon the groundshaking CRISPR technology. I learned that CRISPR has the power to insert, edit, and delete any gene in a genome. Studying the future of gene editing has been fascinating, especially from an ethical perspective. I've found myself talking about it to my friends and family, partly because it's scary what can be done with this new technology and also partly because I can understand some of the benefits. As part of our class, Dr. Herron said we will watch Gattaca, 1997 science fiction film about a gene-edited future. I saw the trailer and the results are surprisingly accurate as to what could actually happen with the future of editing the genes of humans before they are born.

One of our biggest projects near the beginning of the quarter was writing a paper that described and critiqued a scientific study related to evolution or genetics based on the primary and secondary literature. As you can imagine, I was overwhelmed at first with this task since it required such a different type of writing than I'm used to. However, I went into my professor's office hours, which helped a lot in interpreting the results of the study. I examined research on the affects of the Steller's sea cow in Pacific kelp forests. My final paper is linked below. I am proud of the result and it is thanks to my professor and the Odegaard writing center, but I feel more equipped and confident in my ability to analyze and write about scientific topics.

Essay 01DNA and Evolution - Google Docs (1).pdf

Download PDF • 960KB

Currently we are working in groups to write papers describing the results of a study we designed and carried out addressing the question of how the genetic diversity of snails in a founding population affects the rate of evolution.

We measured this by calculating the average change in shell thickness, which grew thicker as we added selection pressure (in the form of crabs) to the simulation.

To the right is a screenshot of one of the trials:

Our results came out as inconclusive, which was a bummer with how much work we put into this. We have ideas for better study designs that we are going to talk about in our paper. What I am learning from this project: snails are difficult to manage, even when simulated!