One of the best classes I have taken at UCLA. Professor Berk and Black teach it together and they are very passionate about the subject. They are also very approchable professors and they are willing to go out of their way to help the students. The class teaches you many things about nuclear biology, about DNA and how it is made and how genes are transcribed and translated in very, very, very detaled fasion. There is one midterm and a final for which they give you the questions ahead of time, so you can prepare beforehand. For midterm there were about 16 questions for final about 35 questions on the study guide, from which they chose 4 for the midterm and 7 for the final. This can seem a lot, but if you have a friend in the class, you guys can split the questions. There are 6 quizes in the discussions, from which you can drop the lowest grade. I thought the quizes vere pointless, but o well... Overall it is a very informative and very interesting class, I would defenetly recomend it to anyone who is interested in molecular biology.

Dr. Berk's lectures were terribly boring, but after two weeks or so you learn that you don't really have to go to them. He gives you the mid-term and final questions ahead of time. You cover four chapters that he wrote in Molecular Cell Biology. The chapters are really interesting and the way some things were figured out where fascinating. He seemed like a very nice guy and very approachable, even though I never went to his office hours. Basically, if you do the reading and answer the questions ahead of time, you should have no problem doing well in this class, even if the class is not really curved.