Arri Eisen

The Absent Professor: Why We Don't Teach Research Ethics and What to Do about It

Research ethics education in the biosciences has not historically been a priority for research universities despite the fact that funding agencies, government regulators, and the parties involved in the research enterprise agree that it ought to be. The confluence of a number of factors, including scrutiny and regulation due to increased public awareness of the impact of basic research on society, increased public and private funding, increased diversity and collaboration among researchers, the impressive success and speed of research advances, and high-profile cases of misconduct, have made it necessary to reexamine how the bioscience research community at all levels provides ethics education to its own. We discuss the need to and reasons for making ethics integral to the education of bioscientists, approaches to achieving this goal, challenges this goal presents, and responses to those challenges.

Unraveling the role of helicases in transcription

Proteins with seven conserved “helicase domains” play essential roles in all aspects of nucleic acid metabolism. Deriving energy from ATP hydrolysis, helicases alter the structure of DNA, RNA, or DNA:RNA duplexes, remodeling chromatin and modulating access to the DNA template by the transcriptional machinery. This review focuses on the diverse functions of these proteins in the process of RNA polymerase II transcription in eukaryotes. Known or putative helicases are required for general transcription initiation and for transcription‐coupled DNA repair, and may play important roles in elongation, termination, and transcript stability. Recent evidence suggests that helicase‐domain‐containing proteins are also involved in complexes that facilitate the activity of groups of seemingly unrelated genes. BioEssays 20:634–641, 1998.

The Piedmont Project: Fostering Faculty Development Toward Sustainability

Many universities recognize urgent environmental dilemmas and embrace efforts to move campus operations and university culture toward sustainability. However, the broader academic mission across departments and programs is often slower to connect with sustainability efforts. The Piedmont Project at Emory University offers one model of a faculty development program that has fostered an enriching collaborative experience and has created considerable impact across the university.

An integrated approach to addressing addiction and depression in college students.

The authors present an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to address the problem of increasing student mental health issues on college campuses. The model uses addiction and depression as lenses into the problem and links residence life and academic and community internship experiences. The project has a positive impact on student attitudes and actions and strengthens and broadens the campus network required to ensure optimal student mental health.

Teaching Water: Connecting Across Disciplines and into Daily Life to Address Complex Societal Issues

A central problem in higher education is how to best develop in students interdisciplinary thinking and application skills necessary to work and engage effectively in the twenty-first century. Traditional university structures make addressing this problem especially challenging. Using as a model courses with diverse perspectives on water taught by teams of interdisciplinary faculty, we explore one successful approach. We highlight the importance of institutional infrastructure and pedagogical strategies that nurtured our approach and allowed it to work.

A novel DEAD-box RNA helicase exhibits high sequence conservation from yeast to humans

We have identified a novel Drosophila protein, DBP80, that exhibits significant similarity to mouse mDEAD5, yeast TIF1/2, and mammalian eIF-4A. DBP80 is a member of a subclass of DEAD-box proteins that contains a distinct domain, PX(I/R)ILLKR(E/D)EETLEGIKQ(F/Y)(F/Y), in addition to the seven canonical helicase domains.

Ethical Perspectives on Knowledge Translation in Rehabilitation

Although the literature on the ethical dimensions of knowledge creation, use, and dissemination is voluminous, it has not particularly examined the ethical dimensions of knowledge translation in rehabilitation. Yet, whether research is done in a wet lab or treatments are provided to patients in therapeutic settings, rehabilitation professionals commonly use (as well as create) knowledge and disseminate it to peers, patients, and various others. This article will refer to knowledge creation, use, and transfer as knowledge translation and examine some of its numerous ethical challenges. Three ethical dimensions of knowledge translation will particularly attract our attention: (1) the quality of knowledge disseminated to rehabilitationists; (2) ethical challenges in being too easily persuaded by or unreasonably resistant to putative knowledge; and (3) organizational barriers to knowledge translation. We will conclude with some recommendations on facilitating the ethical soundness of knowledge translation in rehabilitation.

The American Science Pipeline: Sustaining Innovation in a Time of Economic Crisis.

Significant limitations have emerged in Americas science training pipeline, including inaccessibility, inflexibility, financial limitations, and lack of diversity. We present three effective programs that collectively address these challenges. The programs are grounded in rigorous science and integrate through diverse disciplines across undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students, and resonate with the broader community. We discuss these models in the context of current economic constraints on higher education and the urgent need for our institutions to recruit and retain diverse student populations and sustain the successful American record in scientific education and innovation.

The challenge of spirituality in the clinic: symptom of a larger syndrome.

Mark Kuczewski (2007) addresses a key issue in the clinic— the inability or fear of physicians to integrate their own and patients’ spirituality into their medical practice. He describes this problem, its implications, and then carefully suggests some approaches to resolving it. Kuczewski has identified a symptom of a much larger phenomenon, which to be effectively addressed requires broad and profound thought and action. Science and medicine in America today fail to engage ethical or spiritual issues critical to Americans. This failure pervades every level of science and medicine—teaching, professional training, everyday laboratory and clinical practice, and other interactions with the public. The result is a crisis with deep roots and far-reaching repercussions, one of which Kuczewski (2007) explores, for both the future of science and medicine and the future of America as a superpower in a world science makes flatter by the day. We are falling behind in science education, research, and public understanding of science. Science continues to be taught and learned in a vacuum, as if values, ethics and religion do not exist. From kindergarten through doctoral programs, science is taught as a collection of facts, and even in the rare cases in which students actually perform or (rarer still) design their own experiments, ethics and values—the bigger picture of where this information fits—are rarely discussed. Many young students are lucky to have any science at all in a typical school day (Black 2002). This is not surprising if their teachers experienced science only as a disembodied and intimidating collection of information not directly connected to their lives and what is important to them. “I came to college,” says Laurie, one of my students, “to eventually become a doctor, with this whole view of the world I grew up with in my head—religious, spiritual— and then in every course it’s as if that world doesn’t exist.” If even most of us professional scientists and physicians are successful despite our education, what about the majority of Americans who study science only through high school? The result is a science crisis, in many ways specific to the United States, which contributes significantly to profound

Acknowledging levels of racism in the definition of "difficult".

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