BIOL398-04/S15:Class Journal Week 7

Lauren M. Magee

• Now that we have closed out the first section of the course and your first modeling project, read the article Lander, AD (2010) The Edges of Understanding. BMC Biology 8:40.
  1. What distinction does Lander draw between modeling to "discover new knowledge" and modeling for "understanding"?
  2. Which point of view resonates with you more? Why?
  3. Discuss your answers to the above two questions with regard to the research project you just completed.

Tessa A. Morris

1. Lander explains that discovering new knowledge is finding new information, where understanding is finding different ways to explain or interpret information that has already been discovered.
2. The view about understanding resonates with me more. My career goal is to go into the medical field and conduct research on diseases and disorders of the body. Much is known about the human body, but I want to use mathematical techniques to find new and more effective ways of analyzing different medical disorders
3. In this project, we dealt with understanding, rather than discovering new knowledge. We used Matlab in order to come up with a mathematical model to try and further explain nitrogen metabolism. This research project was interesting to me because it used modeling for understanding, which was the type that resonates more with me.

Tessa A. Morris 19:22, 2 March 2015 (EST)