From YouTube to DnaTube
(May 30th 2007) You may search for - and even find - science videos amongst the Google junk between girls going wild and communiqués of Islamic fundamentalists. Some science clips went astray within the YouTube videos that run the gamut from being hilarious to absolute trash. Just recently, three sites were launched sharing only science videos. Karin Hollricher reports.
Want to hear Richard Dawkins interviewing the Bishop of Oxford, or a lecture given by cancer specialist Robert Weinberg? Want to know what PPARs are? Need a practical guide for nuclear transfer in mouse oocytes or for transplantation of kidney marrow in zebrafish? Switch on your computer and rejoice! Finally, video content for science has arrived on the Internet!
Log-in to DnaTube, a YouTube-type clone. This site provides video based studies, lectures and seminars. You may either watch videos or upload your own tapes. "Our goal is to contribute to science by generating a self-growing community which shares its scientific experiences. Most DnaTube members are graduate students from universities of all countries", proclaim DnaTube editors on their website. The most viewed videos so far are a genetics lecture with Eric Lander and videos about stem cells and RNA interference.
The second website is
www.labaction.com. LabAction editors pitch themselves as "the most popular Biology video-sharing online community hub for Biologists around the world". Quite an easy feat to achieve considering that, currently, there are only a few video-sharing websites on science anyway! LabAction defines itself as a platform for sharing information about lab protocols, techniques and basics of biology through videos. The users have already started ranking the videos. "What do you do in the darkroom?" has trounced all others to date.
Number three in the club is
www.jove.com. It collects videos demonstrating life science experiments step-by-step, making the reproduction of scientific protocols much simpler. This site is the only one disclosing its editors, namely Moshe Pritsker, a post-doc at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, the web-designer Nikita Bernstein and Aaron Kolski-Andreaco, immunologist at the University of California, Irvine.
Video-based science is a young craft, so it's no surprise that the quality of the video clips varies dramatically. Some are fully incomprehensible - no tone, no written comments - whereas others are extremely impressive and professionally made. If video clip sites are to become an educational tool they need to guarantee a certain level of quality. In this respect, jove.com does the best job by far.
Despite videos showing lab animals being dissected, which might not be to everybody's taste, the clips show great promise as educational tools. Students can learn how to perform new experiments, glean the tricks and heed the pitfalls. It's an innovative idea, definitely one with huge scope for development!
