From Bio 101 to Pillars of Biology: A Pedagogical Experiment

Within the Department of Cell Biology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, each student is required to present a research article of his or her choosing for the department journal club. As new students entering the Department, it was unclear to us (Sabrina Volpi and Sandeep Wontakal) whether there were any rules for choosing the papers we would pres- ent. Should the paper relate to work performed within the Department? Did the paper have to be published within the last year, or five years, or could we select a “classic” paper from the early 1900s? While pondering these questions, we realized we shared a great interest in reading the original “landmark” papers we had once learned about in our introductory biology courses, the papers that laid the foundation of what we know as biology today.