Enlivening basic-science learning with current journal articles

Pre-clinical medical students are often unconvinced that the basic sciences are clinically valuable. Also, they are hesitant about formulating ideas on their own from non-textbook sources. First-year medical students taking histology or neurobiology were persuaded to consult articles from the current biomedical literature. I set brief short-answer and labeled-sketch questions well before the course theoretical examinations, where the answers counted toward the score. The answers could only be found by reading in articles made available in the laboratory. The articles were chosen to display basic-science knowledge in action in clinical contexts. The questions offer an additional curriculum that can be steered toward, for example, concerns of family practice, mechanisms of common diseases, and topics of fast-increasing clinical importance.