XXII. BIOCHEMICKÝ ZJAZD - Jesseniova lekárska fakulta

Lectures
DO WE TEACH BIOCHEMISTRY IN a LOGICAL WAY? REMarKS
CONCERNING THE CONTENTS AND LEarNING APPROACH
Jiří Hudeček
Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Science, Charles University
Hlavova 2030/8, 128 40 Praha 2, Czech Republic
I was always puzzled with the fact that among many of the most motivated and gifted
students of “pure” chemical disciplines, there was a sort of depreciatory attitude towards
biochemistry. (Occasionally, I could feel a similar attitude also among teachers.) At the
same time, biochemical problems are often “invading” the field of the “pure” chemical
disciplines, and one can say that at present a considerable percentage of all research in
our chemical Departments has a strong connection with biochemistry. Certainly, part of
the reasons for this situation might be historical, but there is a tendency for reproduction
of these feelings. After conducting some interviews with students, I understand now that
for the more logically thinking students, biochemistry is often a discipline too “biological”
(in the sense “historical”), just describing things and showing some a posteriori explanations.
Additionally, the traditional approach to teaching (I call it “synthetical”) forces
students to learn a lot of facts, for long time seemingly without much logical coherence.
They sometimes have a difficulty to understand the reasons why to learn, say, details of
the citrate cycle. As the overall view of the intermediate metabolism comes only later,
they may lose the enthusiasm long before coming close to get any sense of the beauty
of the discipline. In the present contribution, I would like to discuss several possibilities
how the situation might be improved: (1) using the “analytical” concept (an overall
view later completed with details), (2) stressing the “chemical logic” in certain parts of
biochemistry (structure and properties of biopolymers), (3) strong connection between
the description (results) and experimental background for it, etc.
62 XXII. Biochemistry Congress, Martin