Year 1 Tutorials: Frontiers in Science Summary

Marking Guidelines

Assignment
The ‘Frontiers in Science’ talks are a series of lectures given by leading researchers from the
Faculty. The talks are aimed at a general audience.
Prepare a short summary (250 words) of the talk and write this in a style for a lay, or non-
specialist, audience e.g. in a format suitable for inclusion in a quality national daily newspaper.

Marking guidelines
The lay abstract should provide a clear and accurate summary of the talk and the following
components should be assessed (% split in brackets):
Content (60%): Is there a general introduction to the topic of the talk?
Does the summary indicate why the topic of the talk is important?
Is the main take home message of the talk made clear?
Does the summary present information in a logical manner?

Language (40%): Is there over-use of jargon and/or technical terms?

Are concise sentences used and words with few syllables?

Length: 10% should be deducted from total if >250 words

The following can be used as a guideline for awarding marks:

<50% Badly written summary. Disjointed with no logical flow of information. Written for
scientific audience with over-use of technical language.
50-59% Some attempt to use lay language. Main points of talk are covered although not always
in logical manner.
60-69% Talk is summarised reasonably well with only occasional use of technical language
and/or jargon.
≥70% Clearly written summary with excellent use of lay language.

1
Example lay summaries

“Good”
Convulsions caused by a high body temperature (febrile seizure) affect around five out of every
one hundred children under the age of five. These seizures are not normally serious. However, if
really bad they can lead to a certain type of epilepsy when the child is older. Unfortunately this
epilepsy is not treatable at the moment. It is therefore important to understand how this epilepsy
occurs, so that drugs can be designed to stop it happening.
To do this scientists are testing whether proteins in the body that cause inflammation might be
involved in the link between the febrile seizures and epilepsy. They think this might be so because
it is already known that these proteins are involved in febrile seizure and diseases that affect the
brain. If it is found that these proteins cause the epilepsy then experiments will be done that stop
the proteins from working properly. If these experiments prevent the epilepsy then this proves that
the proteins are involved, so drugs that stop inflammation might stop the epilepsy. Many anti-
inflammatory drugs are already in use and therefore could be put to use quickly for the treatment of
epilepsy.

“Bad”
Febrile seizures affect 5% of the population under the age of five and typically are not associated
with long-term effects. However, prolonged and repeated (complex) febrile seizure episodes have
been linked to the subsequent development of temporal lobe epilepsy, which is refractory to
currently available anti-convulsant treatments. Therefore a key question for researchers is to
determine the underlying mechanisms responsible for the temporal lobe epilepsy in those patients
suffering complex febrile seizures in infancy, so that appropriate therapeutic approaches can be
developed.
Extensive literature exists to demonstrate a prominent role for inflammation in many
neurodegenerative conditions, including epilepsy. Therefore recent research has focused on the
involvement of inflammatory mediators such as cytokines in linking the complex febrile seizures in
infancy with epilepsy in later life. Demonstration of increased cytokine expression in experimental
models of febrile seizure would appear to support this, as does the association of polymorphisms
in certain cytokine genes in patient studies. Intervention studies against specific cytokines in
appropriate experimental models will enable confirmation of a causal role in the temporal lobe
epilepsy and lead to the introduction of anti-inflammatory strategies for the treatment of temporal
lobe epilepsy.