Profile of Bruce Alberts: The education president

As Bruce Alberts steps down July 1 as one of the most accomplished and distinguished presidents of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), he is singularly focused on education—specifically, teaching his students about real science. He has been brewing an idea for a new science course that he would like to teach to graduate students at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), the approach for which is partly inspired by the 3 years he spent in graduate school charging straight into an experimental dead-end. First, Alberts says, he would toss out the traditional classroom lectures and instead hand students a small stack of carefully selected scientific articles. Then he would have them argue among themselves about which papers are outstanding and, most importantly, which are not. “We always talk about good papers, but we never talk about the substantial amount of mediocre work that's done,” Alberts says.

Actually, Alberts prefers the term “boring” for papers that fail to rock the foundations of the scientific world and that describe work arguably not worth doing. He wants to get students and scientists talking about what he considers the critical issue in a scientific career: how a scientist learns where to spend limited time, money, and energy in the most effective way. “I think the right type of course could do a lot to help future scientists develop the kind of taste and judgment they need to really be successful,” he says. Good scientists usually acquire this research acumen by osmosis or “trial and error,” Alberts says. “In my case, it was a lot of error.”

Nearly 30 years after his graduate school stumbling blocks, Alberts came to Washington, …