Case Studies/A mathematical way to think about biology
Excellent site for both basic and advanced lessons on applying mathematics to biology — https://twitter.com/NCIPhySci/status/304250851193655296
Overview
In 2009, the National Cancer Institute began funding the Physical Sciences-Oncology Network to bring physical scientists together with biologists to look at cancer in new ways. 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."
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. 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. This website is a collection of video tutorials to help biologists, clinicians, and patient advocates prepare for courses in quantitative biology. 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) who has worked in the Physical Sciences-Oncology Network, both in a physics group and a biology group.
License Usage
The slide decks and video tutorials are individually released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.
Motivations
How did the author or organization first hear about Creative Commons? Why did they choose to license under Creative Commons? Which license did they select and why? Any other issues you may have come across/comments you’d like to make.
The author felt uncomfortable with more traditional paywall and pay-per-view models for disseminating teaching materials for knowledge. Starting out in physics and then interacting biological disciplines, he was amazed
Impact of the Creative Commons
One of the videos is derived in noticeable ways from a research journal article. The author wanted to know whether the video could be released CC BY-SA. 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 about copyleft principles has greatly increased. This made it easy for the journal to approve distribution of the video under CC BY-SA.
Media
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