The curriculum
Chapters one and two contain no science at all. Chapter three builds cancer biology from the cell upward. Chapter five is a reference you keep coming back to rather than something you read once.
How science reasons — and how not to fool yourself
Integrity, collaboration, and saying it straight
What cancer is, and how a cell powers and builds itself
What data exists, and how to handle it without breaking it
The statistics and the code, as a reference you return to
Now go and find a question of your own
Every term from all six chapters in English and Arabic, following the register of the Unified Medical Dictionary. The curriculum is taught in English; this is so the concepts are yours in both languages.
Download the glossary →The curriculum is archived on Zenodo with a permanent DOI, so this link keeps working whatever happens to this site.
Gomosani, A., & Marghalani, H. (2026). Basira Curriculum. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21791751
That DOI always points at the newest version. Chapters may be cited individually by number and title.
Licence · CC BY 4.0. Use it, adapt it, teach from it, translate it — commercially or not. The only condition is that you credit us.
Seventeen sessions across September and October, each with one video or reading attached, plus every assignment deadline and quiz window.
Download the plan →Open to critique
Work that anyone can inspect is work that can be corrected. If a claim is overstated, a figure misleads, or an explanation does not land, say so — we teach students to do exactly this, and the curriculum should be held to the same standard.
Using it
All six chapters are free to read, free to share and free to teach from. No sign-up and no email wall.
01
Start at Chapter 1 and go in order. Chapters 1 and 2 need no science at all, and the checkpoints through each chapter tell you whether it landed before you move on.
02
The weekly plan maps all six chapters onto seventeen two-hour sessions, with a video or reading attached to each. Take it as it is or cut it to fit your own timetable.
03
We published this openly so it can be corrected. If something in it is mistaken, out of date, or badly explained, write to us and we will fix it.
Assignments
Not separate homework. Assignment three is where your own research question is born, and everything after it sharpens that same question.
Take a published claim apart. Place it on the ladder, list every rival explanation, and design the test that kills each one.
Review a peer's work properly — steelmanned and specific. Then find a published figure that misleads, and fix it.
Read into something that interests you, hunting for claims everyone cites and nobody has tested. Trace three back to the source. This is where your question comes from.
Find out whether the data to answer your question actually exists — and say plainly what it cannot answer.
Pre-register it. Method, controls, thresholds, and one sentence naming the result that would prove you wrong.
Run it. Report it at the strength the evidence supports. Then decide: extend, validate, or abandon.