“The important thing is not to stop questioning,” said Albert Einstein, and that is exactly what a group of 24 high school students are doing this summer at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson.
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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – Students from Tucson, the Phoenix area, several rural and border communities and Indian reservations in Arizona and one student from Texas are learning to question established medical knowledge while working as paid researchers in the Summer Institute on Medical Ignorance (SIMI) Research Program for High School Students. The seven-week program is being held through July 23.
The SIMI Research Program offers financially, socially or educationally disadvantaged high school students an opportunity to work full-time with pay on biomedical research projects with UA College of Medicine researchers in their laboratories and clinics, and often with medical students, as well.
“Explorations in the SIMI Research Program open a boundless universe for the students,” says Marlys Witte, MD, professor with the UA College of Medicine Department of Surgery and director of the program, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Science Education Partnership Award.
“Questions are the starting point and continuation of all learning and discovery, and skilled questioners are needed to expand our horizons. The SIMI program uses the insights and techniques of medical ignorance – unanswered questions and unquestioned answers – to improve science education and health literacy,” Dr. Witte explains.
In addition to research work, SIMI participants attend an innovative seminar series, directed by Dr. Witte, that encourages questioning of established medical knowledge. “They learn that inquiry is what makes research creative and exciting, and that finishing a course of study with more and better unanswered questions is healthy and desirable,” she notes.
All participants also attend an “Introduction to Molecular Medicine” mini-course that offers hands-on, state-of-the-art laboratory sessions, including DNA isolation and DNA fingerprinting.
Since it first was offered at the UA in 1987, 473 students have participated in the SIMI Research Program for High School Students and a significant number have gone on to pursue careers in medical fields. Thirty-six have graduated from, or are in, medical school, including 12 who have graduated from and six who currently are attending the UA College of Medicine. Two have gone to Stanford University School of Medicine, two to Harvard Medical School, one to Yale University School of Medicine, one to Duke University, one to Cornell University and one to Mayo Medical School. Four former participants have received dual MD/PhD degrees, and others have pursued degrees at colleges of nursing, pharmacy and veterinary medicine.
The SIMI program also introduces participants to new technologies under development, including the first-ever broadband Internet-based Virtual Clinical Research Center (VCRC) and the Medical Ignorance Exploratorium (MIEx). The VCRC and MIEx provide access to specialized medical information, including videos and multimedia applications for student research.
Assisted by the UA’s Arizona Telemedicine Program and partnerships with other institutions, the VCRC and MIEx create live, Internet-based, age-appropriate and culturally sensitive collaborative experiences that span clinical research topics, from artificial hearts to breast cancer to gene therapy.
Similar to the concept of Second Life®, the students become skilled “Questionators” who surf the Internet for resources and create, navigate and query expanding “Islands of Medical Ignorance” as members of multidisciplinary clinical and translational research teams.
The MIEx was initiated in the summer of 2005 by the UA College of Medicine’s Information Technology Services under the guidance of Peter Crown, PhD, multimedia collaboratory producer with the UA College of Medicine Department of Surgery. Part of the MIEx, called the Collaboratory Space, enables small groups of students to work together on a project via the Internet at any time and location.
For more information about the UA Summer Institute on Medical Ignorance (SIMI) Research Program for High School Students, visit the website: www.ignorance.medicine.arizona.edu
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