My last editorial for the Journal seems a long time ago. Much has happened since, and we have paid tribute to John Barker, formerly editor of this journal, who very sadly passed away after contracting Covid-19. Losing one of our own to the ongoing pandemic brings the disease into sharp focus, and indeed most people in the UK and around the world now know someone who has suffered from the disease, or sadly lost their life, in the past 12 months. In the UK, we have lost over 120000 lives, our children have been away from school for at least 6 months, and many have lost their jobs.
In the face of this tragedy, we should recognise that biology educators have renewed purpose.
We now have biological heroes, who have generated vaccines in record time. In Sarah Gilbert’s lab at the University of Oxford, scientists had already engineered a modified chimpanzee cold virus as the basis for a vaccine against other diseases, giving her a head-start in the development of a vaccine to Covid-19. The so-called Pfizer vaccine is equally impressive, being the first large-scale mRNA vaccine, causing human cells to generate harmless Covid-19 antigens, which then trigger an immune response. Both are elegantly simple approaches, both are brilliant, and both promise to revolutionise vaccine development going forward. The scientists who worked on these vaccines are an inspiration for others and demonstrate why biology and biological education are both so essential.
Indeed, biological education has never been so important. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, a significant minority of people around the world have continued to believe wrongly that the pandemic is a hoax. Even some in the UK have entered hospitals to take pictures of empty corridors as ‘evidence’ to support their case. Those who are reluctant to, or refuse to, be vaccinated against contagious diseases have become more vocal, with a minority even believing that any vaccination effort is a ploy by Bill Gates to inject microchips as part of a mass surveillance programme. These arguments make little sense to us as scientists, but the generation of such stories as vehicles for denial of scientific ideas is not new. Conspiracy theories and disinformation have new opportunity in the relatively unregulated and unchallenged communication mechanisms afforded by social media. In issue 5 of the previous volume, Michael Reiss argued that biology curricula should require our students to read and listen more critically, to judge claims, and ask themselves who is making a claim, why and on what evidence.
This is particularly important for decision-makers, such as politicians, in trying to understand and react to advice from scientists. If they were taught biology as a body of uncontested facts (as commonly presented in textbooks), can we really expect them to understand and appreciate the knowledge claims put forward by scientists and doctors in a context like a pandemic (where the science may not be uncontested)? If the answer is no, then it is perhaps unsurprising that some were slow to follow the scientists’ advice, or mistrustful of them altogether.
If we do want politicians (and others) who can make informed decisions about biological issues, we need to educate our students to become biologists, developing their agency and autonomy as biologists by providing authentic research experiences, enabling them to learn through critical inquiry, and by going beyond the contents of a textbook to understand how scientific knowledge is built. If biological education has renewed purpose, we should take the opportunity to refresh and renew our teaching, our learning and our curricula.