科学与数学jsomers.net编辑精选
我本应爱上生物学
I should have loved biology
2020 — 2024，它一次次回到首页
黑点是上首页（≥ 50 分）的那次投稿，空心点是没冲上去的投稿，点越大分数越高。
导读
作者回顾自己当年因教学方式枯燥而错过了生物学的魅力，成年后重新发现细胞内部的分子机制竟如此精妙——DNA 复制、错配修复等过程宛如精心设计的算法。文章感叹生物学本可以是最令人惊叹的学科，却被死记硬背的课堂毁掉了。
为什么经久不衰：它戳中了无数人的共同遗憾：学校教育只教“是什么”而不教“为什么”，而文中展示的分子生物学之美让人重新燃起对生命科学的好奇。
HN 评论精选
知识爆炸时代的教育体系仍停留在旧模式，灌输式教学毁掉了所有学科的魅力。
不只是生物学，高中每门课都一样。过去 150 年人类知识爆炸式增长，但学校体系仍假装我们停留在 20 世纪初。如今所谓“广泛概览”只能靠强行灌输越来越多的事实、压缩进越来越浅薄无聊的教材，再让你在一次次考试中全部吐出来——这是“暴食式学习”。其实每门学科用对方法都能带来惊奇，所以应该让孩子尽早选择感兴趣的科目，并接受他们高中毕业时不会面面俱到的事实。
rsp1984查看英文原文
It's not just biology. It's basically every subject in high school. The amount of knowledge in the world has exploded in the last 100 - 150 years, yet our school system refuses to adapt and pretends we're still in the early 1900s. Back then you actually could get a good and reasonably in-depth overview of what makes the world work before going to college or work. But those kinds of aspirations are completely futile these days. People in the ministries of education and other responsible bodies will argue that high school's purpose is not to educate on a subject in depth but to give a broad overview of many subjects but that's completely besides the point. Because the point is that the only way that they are able to "give you a broad overview" these days is by force-feeding you ever more facts and knowledge in sliced up classes, compressed into ever more shallow and boring text books and then letting you puke it all out in brain dead exams, many times a year for many different subjects, in parallel. Bulimia learning. Which is beyond sad, because basically every subject can be the source of wonder and amazement if taught the right way and with enough time to explain and explore. Which is why we need to let our kids choose the subjects they are interested early in school and get comfortable with the fact that they won't have any knowledge about other subjects when they leave high school. There simply isn't any other way.
只有当化学工具与生物学叙事结合时，生命的机制之美才真正显现，其复杂度堪比最难的分布式系统。
化学的机制与生物的“魔法”之间存在巨大鸿沟，大多数人要到教育后期才能弥合它。直到高年级修了生物化学，我才把分子生物学的故事和有机化学的工具结合起来，重新理解了克雷布斯循环和光合作用——它们是真实可理解的化学反应，而非待背诵的事实链。细胞里每个过程都有化学机制，但生命的魔力在于这些过程以极其复杂的方式交织。想象一下逆向工程一个由数万个服务组成的、自然演化而来、毫无工程规范的分布式系统——这就是生命系统的复杂度。
bognition查看英文原文
There is a large gap between the mechanisms of chemistry and the magic of biology that most people do not see closed until late in their education. It's a real shame that this gap cannot be closed sooner. In undergrad I took a bunch of biology and chemistry classes. It wasn't until I took Biochemistry (a senior level class) that everything came together. The biochemistry class I took was a re-telling of all the stories you learned in molecular biology but with the tools you acquire in organic chemistry. Equipped with those tools I relearned the Krebs cycle and photosynthesis as real chemical reactions that make sense rather than a chain of facts to be memorized. The class left me with a deep and profound reverence for life. Every process in a cell has a mechanism that can understood with chemistry. However, the magic of life exists where those processes come together and interact in incredibly complicated ways. It's seductive to think that we should be able to tease apart this complicated processes and figure out how "life" works, and maybe someday we will. However, it's easy to underestimate the level of complexity and interconnectedness in these systems. Many of us understand how hard it can be to debug a distributed system. Imagine trying to reverse engineer a distributed system with tens of thousands of interconnected services and messaging queues that all just sort of evolved and were not built with clean engineering practices.
好的教学资源（如 MIT OCW）能展现生物学真正的魅力，与高中课堂形成鲜明对比。
疫情期间我看了 MIT OpenCourseWare 的《生物学导论》课程，强烈推荐！几乎每节课都有真正酷的东西：RNA 测序从昂贵变得几乎免费及其用途、细菌适应抗生素的延时摄影、第一节课就有人用注射器刺入细胞的视频，甚至有能在浏览器里完成的实验。这比高中那些过时教材里的生物学迷人得多。
Verath查看英文原文
During the first part of the pandemic I watched the lectures for the Introductory Biology course [1] from MIT OpenCourseWare. I cannot recommend those highly enough! Almost every lecture brought up and highlighted something really cool and fascinating. Like how RNA sequencing over the last couple of years has gone from expensive to almost free, and what its uses are. Or time-lapse of bacteria adapting to antibiotics. Or just the first lecture showing a video of someone sticking a syringe into a cell. There were even some labs that could be done via a normal web browser. For me this was so much more engaging than the biology I was thought in high school, where we mostly learned things from outdated books. [1]: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/7-016-introductory-biology-fall-2018/
用一个具体例子（DNA 错配修复）展示分子机制如算法般精妙，正是文章所说的被课堂埋没的惊叹。
这篇文章太真实了。我父亲是微生物学家，我未婚妻也是。前几天餐桌上聊到 DNA 错配修复：在大肠杆菌中，MutL、MutS、MutH 三种蛋白协同工作——模板链已被甲基化标记而新合成的子链没有，其中一个蛋白从错配位点出发沿 DNA 搜索最多 1000 个碱基对，找到半甲基化位点后在子链上切口，另一蛋白复合物切除从切口到错配位点的片段，再由 DNA 聚合酶重新合成。仅三种蛋白就驱动了这套复杂的算法。
nneonneo查看英文原文
This article rings so true to me. My father is a microbiologist - and now, so is my fiancée. I'm very lucky that I get to learn about genetics through osmosis now, and boy, is it ever fascinating! I had a dining-table discussion with my dad the other day where the subject of DNA mismatch repair came up. It turns out that, in E. coli, a very simple & widely studied prokaryote, there's a mechanism called DNA mismatch repair which fixes errors which might occur during DNA copying. If an error is detected - a mismatch (e.g. a G paired with a T) - a trio of proteins (MutL, MutS, MutH) spring into action. The original template strand is already methylated - marked with an extra methyl group - at certain points in the genome (usually where there's a C followed by a G). The daughter strand, on the other hand, is usually not methylated yet. So, one of these proteins starts running down the DNA from the mismatch site, looking for a methyl group - up to 1000 base pairs away. When it finds a site with a methyl group on one side but not the other, it nicks (marks) the daughter strand, and another protein complex comes along and chops up everything from the nick to the mismatch site. The DNA polymerase then comes by and resynthesizes the whole strand. Just three proteins are needed to drive this complex algorithm - a linear search procedure which distinguishes the mother from the daughter strand, a marking procedure which identifies the incision point, and a third to chop up the DNA and prepare it for resynthesis. What's even more bonkers is that E. coli - under stressful situations - will disable certain DNA repair mechanisms to deliberately induce more mutations. And I know that there are thousands more such pathways and complex interactions going on in cells all the time - many of which we simply haven't discovered or probed yet. I wish that everything in biology could be explained so neatly. Unfortunately, real biology is so incredibly messy. There's just so much we don't know - and so much that we can't neatly slot into an explanation like this. But, I know now that in another life I probably would have been a biologist!
历次讨论
同类还值得读
如果月球只有 1 像素：一个极其精确的太阳系模型（2014）
If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)
一个网页版太阳系模型，以“如果月亮只有 1 像素”的真实比例呈现：你必须一路横向滚动，才能体会行星之间空旷到何等程度。
科学与数学上首页 7 次 · 2014–2025joshworth.com编辑精选沉浸式线性代数（2016）
Immersive Linear Algebra (2016)
《Immersive Linear Algebra》是一本完全免费、开放在线的线性代数“超文本教科书”，其最大特色是大量可交互的图形：读者可以直接拖动、操作图中的向量、矩阵和变换…
科学与数学上首页 5 次 · 2015–2024immersivemath.com编辑精选如何将贝果切成两个相连的半环（2009）
How to Slice a Bagel into Two Linked Halves (2009)
数学家 George Hart 的经典教程，演示如何用一刀把贝果切成两个相互扣住的环，并附上切割步骤与数学原理。
科学与数学上首页 5 次 · 2009–2022georgehart.com“犹太问题”：一组用于歧视的数学题
Jewish problems
一篇 arXiv 论文，整理并讨论苏联时期犹太学生在申请大学数学系时被问到的特殊数学难题：这些题往往有简单解法却极难想到，被用作面试中拒绝犹太考生的手段。
科学与数学上首页 5 次 · 2011–2021arxiv.org你的身体并非为长久而造：人类死亡率数据的一课
Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates
文章从人类死亡率随年龄变化的统计规律出发，解释身体并非为长久使用而设计：年轻时死亡风险较低，之后随年龄近似指数上升，像复杂系统在不断累积损伤。
科学与数学上首页 5 次 · 2009–2018gravityandlevity.wordpress.com