A little over 20 years ago, the nearly 100-year-old French thinker Edgar Morin published the book *The Reconnection of Knowledge*, in which he proposed—in response to a request for proposals regarding secondary education made to him by France’s then-Minister of Education, Claude Allègre—that the barriers between disciplines be broken down. The text compiles the results of discussions that took place during the Thematic Conferences among the country’s intellectuals on how to reconnect the natural sciences and the cultural sciences. Morin and the group that met in March 1998 asserted that, although it made perfect sense to connect different subjects—especially the humanities and the exact sciences—schools, from elementary through higher education, continued to reinforce the model of fragmentation and disciplinary compartmentalization. This needed to change, and fields of knowledge should be reconnected.

In fact, scientific knowledge has evolved from what has been built up over time, and the best scientists—even those who break established paradigms—stand “on the shoulders of giants,” as Isaac Newton wrote in a letter to Robert Hooke in the 17th century. It therefore makes little sense to teach science without drawing on history.

Hence the importance of teaching the history of science in schools, integrating disciplines and showing students how the scientific research process has evolved over time, how discoveries have occurred, and how laboratory equipment has resulted from scientific observations while, at the same time, accelerating new findings. In this regard, the National Common Core Curriculum (BNCC) for high school is on the right track, both by integrating subjects by areas of knowledge and by requiring that curricula include greater integration between history and the natural sciences.

And this possibility is made easier by the large number of Digital Educational Resources now available to the public, which can be incorporated into lessons, into collaborative projects between teachers of the two disciplines, or into teaching practices within each discipline. Biographies of famous or little-known scientists, images of the daily lives of ordinary people before certain scientific discoveries or inventions, or videos of researchers trying to find cures for diseases that have yet to be thoroughly investigated can foster the desired integration of history and science in the classroom. In this regard, I would strongly recommend exploring the advances in medical research that emerged in the midst of World War I with the misnamed “Spanish flu,” which—much like COVID-19 today—sparked a race among researchers to understand viruses and how they mutate.

While reading the recently published biography of Jennifer Doudna—an American biochemist and 2020 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry—written by Walter Isaacson, *The Decoder*, I realized just how fragile an education is that fails to incorporate history into chemistry or biology classes. The scientist, a pioneer in genetic editing research that can help us combat viruses, made progress in her investigations for two reasons: she incorporated the findings of her contemporaries and benefited from the discoveries and inventions of researchers who preceded her in the major Human Genome Project initiative. Doudna herself advocated for greater integration of the humanities into the education of future scientists.

The opportunity to show children and young people in schools the incredible process of scientific discovery and the evolution of human knowledge will undoubtedly spark greater interest in the scientific field, attracting even more women—such as Doudna—to the sciences and contributing to the “reconnection of knowledge” that Morin advocates.

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