Nurturing the scientific spirit
The third Hong Kong University Biomedical Sciences Summer Academy 2024, supported by Croucher, took place in August this year.
The programme, expanded this year because of high demand, was attended by 50 secondary school students and their teachers. Following our article about the Academy earlier this summer, Croucher News went into the labs with the participants to find out why it has become so popular.
The Academy aims to broaden students’ knowledge about the biomedical sciences and spark their scientific curiosity. The students benefit from being exposed to some of the latest research and are shown how it can relate to their daily lives.
The Academy is highly interactive, and over the five days, students can enjoy hands-on laboratory sessions, laboratory tours, “Meet the Expert” sessions, and roundtable discussions on career development in the field.
This is an opportunity for the students to be exposed to new knowledge and advanced laboratory experiments, meet like-minded friends with similar interests, and have a glimpse of possible futures for themselves in science. And some went to great lengths to attend. One participant, Elaine Huang, travelled from Shenzhen, which involved a four-hour round trip each day, but told us afterwards: “It was worth the effort.”
The programme began with a session called the “Pipette Training and Challenge,” aimed at teaching participants the importance of accuracy at every level of science. Full of insightful questions, they worked hard at the task and were duly delighted when they achieved the high accuracy required to complete the challenge.
They kept up the same level of enthusiasm throughout. In the session about the connection between the physical and electrical activities of the human body, there was also an element of amazement in their discoveries: “I only knew how the heart works in our body but never knew there are electrical activities behind it,” commented one. Another student told us, “Though I already knew running increases the heart rate, I wanted to run to see how it shows up on the ECG.” In another session about growing crystals of proteins using lysozyme, students described their joy at seeing how the proteins crystallised into beautiful shapes.
Evidence of the impact the programme can be seen in the presence again this year of one of last year’s participants, Daniel Chung. This year, he attended in the role of a facilitator for the session on planarians—flatworms which are of interest to science because of their remarkable regenerative abilities.
Hong Kong University has a body donation programme called “Great Body Teacher.” These are cadavers generously donated for the purpose of medical education. Students attending the Academy had the opportunity to learn anatomy directly from these cadavers. They were able to overcome their natural trepidation and talked of their “sense of respect” towards the Great Body Teachers. “Their contribution to science is so powerful and moving,” one of the students told us.
The participants seem to have been positively influenced by the whole experience. “Learning science at university encourages the validation of ideas and multi-perspective thinking. It’s more fun than just following and memorising the textbooks,” commented one of them.
Another told us, “’Honestly, I used to have zero interest in English, but now I have decided to work on my English in order to be able to delve deeper into biomedical science, which I love very much.”
Feedback on the teachers was very positive too. “The professors were super friendly and welcoming to us. This is not what we expected… We used to have a stereotypical impression that professors are unapproachable and serious.”
As they wrapped up the course with their final presentations, many students said they’d learned how to get along and cooperate with classmates from different schools and with different personalities. One student, Mandy Cheng, told us she’s now clearer about wanting to be a biomedical researcher after the Academy. Others were having similar thoughts. Above all, they had begun to see biomedicine in a new light.
“Science can be beautiful,” one of the groups concluded.