Case Studies/A mathematical way to think about biology
Excellent site for both basic and advanced lessons on applying mathematics to biology — Tweeted by the National Cancer Institute Office of Physical Sciences-Oncology (2013 Feb 20)
Overview
In 2009, the National Cancer Institute began funding the Physical Sciences-Oncology Network to bring physical scientists and biologists together to look at cancer in new ways [1]. To fully realize the potential benefit of this network, investigators must accomplish more than simply continuing the development of measurement technologies. Moore et al. have commented that previous "contributions [i.e. x-rays, PET, and MRI] leverage the technology development aspect from the physical sciences . . . but not other important aspects like methodology, practices and thought processes. What is different about the NCI’s PS-OC Program is the conviction that unique physical sciences and engineering approaches and principles can be integrated . . . in cancer research to yield a more fundamental understanding of the disease" [2].
One of these physical sciences "thought processes" is quantitative reasoning. Resources for developing this skill currently include introductory courses in quantitative biology. For example, Los Alamos National Laboratories hosts the invaluable q-Bio summer school [3]. However, mathematical prerequisites for these courses remain a challenge for investigators trained in many life sciences fields.
A mathematical way to think about biology was developed to help address this challenge. The website is a collection of video tutorials to help biologists, clinicians, and patient advocates prepare for courses in quantitative biology [4]. The purpose of these videos is to provide familiarity with introductory topics often presented in quantitative biology courses and confidence to actively learn the more sophisticated concepts that are developed from these foundations.
To ensure broadest delivery of this resource, the slides and videos are made available under a CC BY-SA license.
David Liao is a physicist by training (PhD, Princeton) in the Physical Sciences-Oncology Network.
License Usage
The slide decks and video tutorials are individually released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.
Motivations
Current open access initiatives in research achieve "technical" openness. Journal articles are available for viewing without charge. To achieve actual openness, however, knowledge cannot merely be uploaded as a mass of text and images to a public repository. The know-how to peruse it with ease must also be broadly distributed. Releasing the video tutorials series under CC BY-SA is my way of communicating that this knowledge belongs to everyone.
Impact of the Creative Commons
One of the videos is derived significantly from a research journal article. I wanted to ask them under what licenses I could release the video. A decade ago, this would have required a long email explaining copyleft. Owing to educational outreach by the Creative Commons (and allied efforts by the Free Software Foundation, Wikipedia, and the Public Library of Science), awareness of free culture principles has greatly increased. This made it easy for the journal and me to refer to different licenses according to their abbreviated CC names (they granted permission to release the video under CC BY-SA).
