Science school for judges
Last week, tucked away in a second-floor teaching space at the MIT Museum known as “the cell,” students huddled together in a dark corner of the room labeled “nucleus,” where they laboriously snapped together LEGOs — in this case representing nucleotides — to match a long chain of genetic material in front of them.Then, clutching their strands of messenger RNA, they were ushered toward the center of the room by their instructor, Kathy Vandiver, who sat them at small tables marked “ribosome” and set them off building proteins out of additional toy bricks.But these weren’t primary school students. They were judges from all over the country who had come to MIT for Judges’ Science School, a crash course in scientific information and methods for legal professionals.Sponsored by the Advanced Science and Technology Adjudication Resource Center (ASTAR), a professional organization funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, Judges’ Science School convenes six to eight...