Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra feature stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write a 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: American Biologist Wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry for DNA Work, 10/09/06
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/july-dec06/nobel_10-09.html

Initiating Questions:

1. What is DNA and how do cells use it?

2. What are proteins and how do cells use them?

3. How are stem cells used in scientific research?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. What is the "central dogma" of molecular biology?

The central dogma of molecular biology is that DNA makes ribonucleic acid, or RNA, which then makes proteins.

2. What is "DNA transcription?"

Genetic information would be locked in DNA were it not for the first half of this protein production process -- DNA transcription -- in which DNA is converted to "messenger RNA" using a molecule called "RNA polymerase."

3. What did Roger Kornberg photograph?

Kornberg was the first to photograph the DNA transcription process, showing how strands of DNA and fragments of RNA fit into compartments of the RNA polymerase molecule before producing messenger RNA, which goes on to create proteins in the cell.

4. Instead of ordinary light, what tool did Kornberg use to make his photographs?

The atomic detail of Kornberg's photographs, taken using X-rays instead of ordinary light, has allowed scientists to better understand the process by which RNA is converted into proteins.

5. What are some medically important applications of Kornberg's work?

The unique properties of stem cells, and even the effects of diseases like cancer and heart disease, are results of changes to the transcription process, making Kornberg's work important to medical researchers.
...
New drugs and therapies can be created down the line, though Kornberg does not work for any particular industry.

6. Who is Roger Kornberg's father, and what award did he receive in 1959?

... Arthur Kornberg, won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1959 with Spaniard Severo Ochoa for their work in how genetic information is transferred from one DNA molecule to another.

7. Name two other families in which multiple members have won Nobel Prizes?

The Curies won five, including two by Marie Curie for her work on radiation, and in 1915, Sir William Henry Bragg and his son William Lawrence Bragg shared the prize for their use of X-rays to study crystals...

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. Create a diagram that illustrates the process of DNA transcription into messenger RNA, and messenger RNA into proteins. Include information about other molecules that participate in the process, and show where in the cell these processes take place.

2. Research a disease in which DNA transcription plays a role. What is the name of the disease? Describe, on a molecular level, the role that DNA transcription plays in the illness. What are the latest methods that scientists are exploring to fight the disease and how do these fit into the DNA-to-RNA-to-protein chain? What is the outlook for a cure?

3. Would you like to spend your life looking for cures to diseases? life on other planets? ways to improve the environment? What part of science interests you most? Why? Find a scientist in your community and talk to him or her about his/her career. What would be fulfilling about a career in the sciences? What would be frustrating?