![\"\"](\"http:\/\/lh5.ggpht.com\/erikacule\/SQXw3IN__hI\/AAAAAAAAADU\/so9xa1LG8rQ\/s288\/GCSE_Animal_Cell.png.jpg\")
<\/p>\nAt GCSE level (that’s Freshman\/Sophomore at High School to American students) a cell might look like this:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
By the time you reach A-level\/Senior High, you are presented with something more like this:<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/lh6.ggpht.com\/erikacule\/SQXyowv91oI\/AAAAAAAAAFU\/ChdGY8-FKDg\/s288\/A-Level_Animal_Cell.gif.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
At degree-level, your understanding of the workings of the cell expands in scope:<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/lh4.ggpht.com\/erikacule\/SQXw778zRkI\/AAAAAAAAAEU\/vB97dNUilo0\/s288\/Alberts.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\nBeing obliged to repeatedly re-understand biology (and chemistry), to have to abandon previously held beliefs and “mental models” of how the world works, might be frustrating, but building up progressive levels of complexity is a logical way to teach and to learn.<\/p>\n
I think I expected, however, that eventually<\/em> I might catch up with these revelations. With some sort of “mental model” in place, I might have a sense of what we know and what questions are asking next.<\/p>\n However, my graduate class were presented with a paper<\/a> that threw me completely. Instead of inching my understanding a little further along it seemed to contradict what I had spent three painstaking years trying to understand. Whilst this paper had a different effect on my colleagues<\/a> who hadn’t spend their undergraduate degree grappling with molecular biology, it made me question my assumption that there will at some point stop being surprises around the (academic) corner.<\/p>\n After all, this paper and its sibling<\/a> were not written when I started my degree – perhaps the ideas hadn’t even been considered in their finished form. And Henry blogged not so long ago<\/a> about the<\/p>\n \ngenuinely new and startlingly simple insight into a problem that\u2019s been perplexing people for ages; backed up by a novel, simple and apocalyptically powerful new technique; written like a dream; and from (now get this) a single author.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n that had passed across his desk.<\/p>\n Making the transition from “taught” to “research” student involves re-framing my perception of understanding and of knowlege – perhaps finding a way of comfortably working in the knowlege that there are many things that we don’t know that we haven’t thought of yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At GCSE level (that’s Freshman\/Sophomore at High School to American students) a cell might look like this: By the time you reach A-level\/Senior High, you are presented with something more like this: At degree-level, your understanding of the workings of … Continue reading