A big welcome to “Bioinformatics: Introduction and Methods” from Peking University! In this MOOC you will become familiar with the concepts and computational methods in the exciting interdisciplinary field of bioinformatics and their applications in biology, the knowledge and skills in bioinformatics you acquired will help you in your future study and research. Course materials are available under the CC BY-NC-SA License.
Talk with Dr. Gang Pei (English Subtitles)
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Bioinformatics: Introduction and Methods 生物信息学: 导论与方法
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Evolution function analysis of DNA methyltransferase
Upon completion of this case study module, you will be able to: experience how to use bioinformatic methods to study the function and evolution of DNA methylases; share with Dr. Gang Pei, president of Tongji University and member of the Chinese Academy of Science, the experiences in scientific research and thought about MOOC.
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Ge Gao 高歌, Ph.D.Assistant Professor, Principle Investigator
Center for Bioinformatics, School of Life Science
Liping Wei 魏丽萍, Ph.D.Professor, Director
Center for Bioinformatics, School of Life Sciences
Prof. Gao: This is the last course of "Bioinformatics: Introduction and Methods".
Prof. Pei, as the president of Tongji University, what do you think of the development of domestic and international MOOC courses or other online courses?
Prof. Pei: This is a very good question. I think the rise of the MOOC course is due to the development of network technology.
The online world now fully competes the real world. Therefore, any application of network technology can not be underestimated and is likely to have unlimited prospects.
The network technology plays a very important role not only in the human life, but also in business, entertainment, and culture.
Networking has gradually penetrated into the field of education. In the field of education, networking plays a great role. Why do I say so?
There are a lot of ancient Chinese theories of pedagogy. Personally speaking, I think that a relatively high level of education can be summarized by eight Chinese characters: "provide education for all people without discrimination, teach students in accordance of their aptitude" .
"provide education for all people without discrimination" means everyone can be and should be educated, and can educate others. Everyone is both the educator and the one to be educated.
The reason I used "teach students in accordance of their aptitude" is because the entire education system has not treated every student individually, but has been treating classes of students.
Our education still follows the way of modern machinery on a large scale, which is not quite appropriate now.
Now the resources of higher education, especially the world-class universities and the first-class courses, are extremely scarce, because not everyone has the opportunity to go to university, not to mention those best universities.
Even in the best universities, not everyone can have the best teachers.
Such an apparently impossible thing can now be partly achieved through the network and the MOOC.
I think such a course provides an equal educational opportunity for everyone longing for the best education.
And this education can span different universities, cities and overcome the geographical barrier. It can also go beyond the separation of different cultures, languages and ethnic groups. It turns the earth into a university.
It is very promising and enables everyone to have a better education.
I think MOOC also makes it possible that professors like you can teach more and better students.
I am very optimistic about MOOC’s future.
Prof. Gao: Thank Professor Pei for him speaking highly of the course. We hope we can do better.
Prof. Gao: Now three students here would like to consult Professor Pei for some questions.
Professor Pei: Thanks very much and I’d also like to discuss with you.
Meng Wang: Hello, Prof. Pei, currently there are more and more interdisciplinary sciences that are similar to bioinformatics. So how do you think we should manage the cross-disciplinary research? What are your suggestions?
Professor Pei: A good understanding of mathematics may be needed for bioinformatics. The mastery and application of some specific algorithms is very important.
Here the mathematics might in fact be very specific and would not cover all subfields of the classical mathematics. Nevertheless you still need to master and apply it to study bioinformatics.
You also need to have a better understanding of some basic biological knowledge.
As mentioned just now, every individual biologist might only focus on a very specific question, while bioinformatics will cover a wide, global range of biological questions.
And now the biological problems become more and more complex. It is not simple biology. In the past it’s the genomics [of cells] and cell biology. But now it comes to the individual organism.
There are several important problems about individual organisms such as behaviour science and cognitive science, which are very complex.
Bioinformatics also involves population genetics and knowledge of social science, environmental science, evolution and even archaeology. So it is a very extensive collection of knowledge.
It may actually needs some understanding of the computer science, such as programming.
As an interdisciplinary science, bioinformatics is not very easy. It requires a profound understanding of several different fields.
Also, bioinformatics currently does appear to stand on the margins of these several different fields.
And now it seems that there are indeed some excellent works in this interdisciplinary science. Students of bioinformatics may not necessarily major in biology. You may major in other fields or you may even have a double degree.
I would particularly emphasize that the basic training in undergraduates may be the most important.
Huan Liu: Hello Professor Pei! This interview is very inspiring. I would like to ask you a question which I’m quite concerned about as a doctoral student.
How do you think a doctoral student should arrange his/her five years as a doctoral student? And also what issues should I pay attention to when choosing research topics?
Do you have any advice to share? Or we’d also love to listen to your personal experience.
Professor Pei: The doctoral training can lay for your scientific research and academic career a very important foundation. Here are a few things that are worthy of attention.
One is to have the most important basic skills, which are the basics of scientific research. The undergraduate knowledge is, to some degree, the basis for you to build the necessary knowledge structure.
But the knowledge structure will not naturally become a research capacity. So the in this five years you should mainly train and develop you own research capabilities.
As I have been always stressing, a very important issue is to have the interest and hobby. It is really important.
As the old saying goes, which comes first? Marriage or love? Many couples got married before loving each other in the past when marriages were arranged.
Nowadays many students in colleges and graduate schools get married [with their majors] without love feelings due to many reasons.
I hope our students love bioinformatics truly and deeply from heart when they learn it.
If they don't love that strongly, I hope they will increase their love in future research.
Interest, rather than knowledge, pushes you far away in career.
If you’re very reluctant to learn this, and your interest wanes more as your learn more and you just do what your instructor tells you to do.
Then if you’re obedient or have some responsibility, then you can decide to try your best to do it, regardless of whether you like it or not. In this way you’re aware that you have some conscientiousness.
This is right, but I still hope you can have a hobby for that.
The second is the basic skills as just mentioned. Basic skills are very important, because if you want to go smoothly you must lay the foundation well. Actually, bioinformatics needs a very, very solid foundation,
or a global understanding of the whole. After all, you need to reflect in specific research eventually, or even a specific project. So how to figure it out?
Is the question I’m studying the most interesting one to me and also the most important one?
Keep such a mentality. Your instructor will also consider such a question.
Sometimes we must make a better choice between a project that is easy to do and a little bit difficult project.
I think we should encourage the choice of a little bit difficult project.
Although the final paper produced may not be so good, but you can really learn the basic fundamentals from it. I think it has achieved the purpose as long as we have learnt it.
In addition, you can learn how to solve the difficult problems, from which you can learn more things.
Because people usually learn much more things from failure than success. So if we are afraid to fail now, more trouble will wait for us in our future.
So I think we can take some risks when it is the right time. The final destination may be a certain field, the ideal state of which is what you need to study further when you are a postdoc.
For example, I am interested in bioinformatics, but on which should I focus, evolution, disease, or cancer?
I hope that after five years’ training, I can not only learn the basic knowledge and skills and increase hobby in this field, but also lay a very good foundation
for my future academic career, such as working as a postdoc or a university professor, or getting a job in society. This is an ideal state.
If it’s not the case, that’s all right. If you switch to another topic, it’ll be nice to have another topic in future.
Basically, I hope everyone can try his/her best to study his/her topic. Everyone can devote himself/herself into it and focus on it only.
I can start from a Ph.D., or a postdoc, and become a faculty and keep focusing for twenty or thirty years after which I will have some discoveries. I think that’s not bad.
Nevertheless I might change in future. I am capable of changing and I have such flexibility, and it does not matter if I change to another topic. I think the specific topic you’re studying does not matter that much.
I think the meaning of your topic is more useful than its specific field.
There are three types of your future. The first one is that you love it, and you can do it great in future.
The second one is that you don’t like it, but you have a responsibility or duty for it, which might not necessarily for your parents, your families, your relatives, your own or your teachers; such responsibility is also related to your country and your nation.
Why? Your country has invested a lot of money to train your as a Ph.D, so you need to try your best to make it.
When you graduate you can choose to do anything, including those that are irrelevant to what you’re doing now.
The third one also sounds very obligatory. If you do not choose the previous two types, then you choose to quit. Then you’re responsible for yourself and also others. I think there are only these three possibilities.
Do you know the three realms of learning proposed by Guowei Wang? The first realm can be described by this Chinese poetic saying: “Westerly winds withered trees up last night, alone on the high rises, looking over all the roads on the horizon”.
This is the first realm for all the knowledge.
It means “to be or not to be，to do or not to do”.
He got on the high-rise and saw the long road in the distance. It’s a such long road and he couldn’t determine whether to go or not.
You’re in the first realm now.
The second realm can be described by this Chinese poetic saying: “The dress takes to loosen gradually and I am more and more emaciated, [but] no regretful plying at all”. It means that you must make painstaking efforts for research or other things.
The last realm can be described by this Chinese poetic saying: “Having searched for him hundreds and thousands of times in the crowd, suddenly I turn back, and he is there by the dim light”.
Guowei Wang’s three realms are very important.
Prof. Liping Wei: I’d like to ask you a question. It was said MOOC will replace the traditional universities in the future. What do you think?
Prof. Gang Pei: That will not happen.
Prof. Wei: There are some universities that would disappear, what’s your opinion about it?
Prof. Pei: In my opinion, the function performed by universities is very interesting. Educations are mainly achieved by community, not classroom.
In fact, many universities, such as Harvard University and Cambridge University, are traditional residential college.
In the residential college, people learn the courses taught in universities together.
No matter whether it is of nature science, or humanities, or history, or whatever other fields, they all have some knowledge inside.
However, there is also a social context; in other words, social interaction, social communication, social understanding, and the identity of whole society are all hard to achieve by MOOC.
MOOC hardly catch them in this aspect, but in term of knowledge. However, universities should develop its function as community in future.
Will MOOC develop into a hybrid system in future? Aside from the online courses, it should also develop the off-line function as a community.
If it could fulfill requirement in this aspect, it will be very powerful in future.
Prof. Gao: When talking about the direction of development of MOOC, we mentioned that MOOC can help students select certain classes they’re interested in.
Is it a good direction for the development of MOOC in your opinion?
Prof. Pei: I think it’s a good direction (for MOOC), which I expect it to be at least. Let’s back to this very interesting question.
I think you can find some profiles by the educational practice like MOOC after two or three years.
You can see which kind of people have registered, what’s their performance in the class and what their grades are. But these three are not sufficient; you should also follow up.
You can follow up three or five years, or even longer time, to collect data to find some patterns.
I have an intuition that a particular kind of case may appear.
The methodology and basic knowledge you teach can inspire him in other fields，such as business, real estate or financial industry.
It’s just like that many things grow in the garden that were never sown there.
I think this course might inspire not a lot of famous bioinformaticians, but a lot of successful social people.
Then you would achieve what you want to achieve. I’m curious about it and I will make some prediction here.
I hope my prediction can become some criteria for MOOC courses such as yours after 5 or 10 or 20 years.
Also, I think it is very hard for one to choose his/her job and hobby.
So I hope everyone can find out what you really like to do by learning such online courses.
Otherwise they will not have such an opportunity to do what they want to do. This is a possibility.
Another possibility is that you can keep such a hobby forever, even if you are doing something else to make a living.
I think it will also be very nice.
So the second question is related with the first one. As for the future of social function MOOC,
It is difficult to determine which is more important between educational functions and social functions.
It actually makes everyone finally find his own position in society, which is a very important way.
One is the work he really engaged in, the other is the one he may not work in. But the former as hobby shows his love.
Actually this is very similar to early science in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when these people were doing science as a hobby.
Even Einstein had been working as a staff in patent office when he proposed the theory of relativity.
In this way they could make a lot of great achievement. Few people treat science as a profession like us. Will the society return to that place in the future?
There may be three forms of the most popular MOOCs in the future: the one a society needs most,
the one that is currently the most fashionable, and the one where teachers teach the best.
Merge these three elements may be the only way to make a great MOOC.
This is my another hypothesis, or a corollary. I do not know whether it is true but I hope it is.
I hope the students from MOOC will love MOOC, become the best MOOC teachers and flourish MOOC from generation to generation.
Teacher Gao: We wish you all a happy ending of this semester and get good grades in final exams. Thank you.
Thank professor Pei as well.
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