I personally have some mixed feelings about this class, but I took it for the lab requirement and ended up doing well. Befriending your group is SO important, because you will depend on each other a lot for sharing data and breaking up the workload when you need to make up experiments. You will also be doing a presentation on an experiment together, as well as a final presentation with all your data, so working well together on that is necessary.
You 100% will be coming in on your own time to keep your project on schedule, so try to keep your non-lab afternoons open. Her quizzes were manageable if you studied, she loves lecture participation and will call on you if you're not participating enough, and the midterm paper is a beast to write but I don't think she graded my class's papers too harshly. She can be a little blunt when critiquing you, but she's a really engaging lecturer and I liked the way she explained things during class. This class was definitely tough and time-consuming, so maybe schedule it during one of your lighter quarters, but I don't think it's as bad as some people make it out to be.

Easy A GE. Prof Lee is super nice and gives fun lectures. I learned a lot by attending the lectures, but they are also bruin casted. Participation worths a lot, breaking down to discussion, clicker questions, and a in-class presentation. The tests are straightforward, and there's also a decent amount of extra credit(like you can get 110% on the midterm and final). Nice and interesting class, strongly recommended.

I took this class to satisfy my Social Analysis requirement. It was both interesting and easy. Definitely attend the lectures, not only because they help for the midterm and final but also because there were interesting discussions and really cool guest speakers.
A lot of points were practically given away, like clicker questions (just participation) and discussion board posts (sharing one article/post/question) a week. Apart from that, there was no weekly work. The readings weren't necessary for the class at all, but they were fun to read occasionally and might give you ideas for your paper.
The midterm and final were straight from the lecture slides. Learn that extremely carefully. It might take 2 days for the midterm and the final. The midterm was more technical while the final had a lot more ethical questions, and if you prepare well, you can get above a 100% in both (she gives extra credit). The midterm paper wasn't too bad (4 sides) and this is coming from someone who hates writing papers. There was one group presentation which wasn't a whole lot of work.
My TA (Devin Gibbs) deserves a shout-out, he was extremely passionate about the material and made discussions very interesting. He was also very prompt in answering questions.
Overall, this class has practically no work on a weekly basis but does require extensive study time right before the midterm and final. The paper and presentation should not take too long. It's also an easy A. Definitely recommend this class!

The first part of the class, phylogenetic analysis of the unknown gene, is sort of difficult because the gene is previously uncharacterized and you have to justify its placement in a tree and how it relates to a homologous gene in another organism. Lectures aren't bruincasted, so you may have to harass your TAs in the lab for tips to get you started (But don't harass them too much, they're kind and one of the highlights of the course!) This was the first quarter that the class worked individually on the gene hybridization, but I preferred it that way because I got to learn each technique in more detail. The downside is that you have to do many of the steps yourself, including redoing PCR if it fails, remaking PCR products if you run out, etc. Be prepared to come in quite often outside of class, especially week 7-9. Make friends with your bench if you want to keep your sanity by having them help with failed steps. If you finish early, you can potentially be done with the class by the end of week 9, which is really nice.

This class is an easy A (unless you have a bad TA, in my case). Dr. Lee provides in-depth study guides for both the midterm and final and takes exam questions straight from the lecture slides. The lecture reading isn't necessary, but can be interesting. Definitely do the discussion readings. There is one group project, which is easy and is split between 20 people, so the workload is light. TAKE THE MIDTERM PAPER SERIOUSLY. I got an A on all exams and 100% for participation and I still finished the class with a B+ because I was slightly off topic on the midterm paper. The class is about 65% biology and 35% ethics/moral philosophy.

I will preface this review with this statement: this class is not curved, tough and requires a lot of studying.

Professor Lee is great; she was very helpful and made it clear to the class that she was available to meet and gave appropriate times. The lecture slides were sometimes hard to follow, and she would often brush over experimental techniques, assuming that we know what they are.

The exams are long and very time-constrained. You MUST know all experimental techniques before her exams if you want to do well. However, she did give plenty of bonus points on the exams (15% bonus points for both midterms and 20% bonus points on the final) to cushion your grade and boost you up. There is a presentation that must be done on a research paper that everyone has to do in discussion, but it wasn't too bad.

Overall, a very fair class. The TA was extremely helpful and made this class a little more doable.

Be prepared to do a LOT of work for this class. The lab notebooks, which are worth 40% of your grade, are due every week and can be kind of tedious to finish (depending on the experiments you conduct each week). For reference, there was a period where I was consistently writing 4000-5000 words for each lab notebook. The TAs can be kind of picky about them while grading, but nothing too unreasonable-- I always thought the feedback I received was fair and well thought out.

In the same vein, I feel like your TA can really make or break your experience in this class, since the majority of your time is spent in lab (4 hours/week) and since they are the ones who grade the lab notebooks. Get Nick (O'Connell) if you can, he was my favorite!! He's awesome at answering whatever questions you have, even if they're kind of stupid/basic, and he helped me understand how to apply the material from class really well. He's also really good at anticipating what mistakes you might make when conducting your experiments, which is the hallmark of a great TA in any class imo. Nick is also just a lovely person in general, and I didn't get the sense that he played favorites or anything like that, like another review mentioned for one of the other TAs. I seriously feel like I lucked out with him lol.

The other components of our grade were the weekly quizzes, weekly experimental plans, lab conduct, and lab safety training that you do before the quarter starts. I think the class structure has changed a lot from previous quarters, judging by previous reviews. We didn't have to write a midterm or final paper, just the final oral presentation at the end of the quarter, and we didn't work in groups. The weekly quizzes weren't too bad, as long as you focus on the "tricky" aspects of experiments that Professor Lee mentions in lecture, and the experimental plans were pretty brief and essentially graded on completion. The final oral presentation was 9-11 minutes over zoom with a Q&A component at the end, where the prof and TA ask you questions, and it was individual, meaning that the rest of the class didn't watch you present. Lab conduct was basically if you brought your lab coat to lab every week and wore safety goggles during the one week that we needed them. (Sidenote: if you haven't done the chem lab series yet, i.e. 14BL and 14CL, don't make the mistake I did and buy a white lab coat. Apparently the chem department requires blue ones for whatever reason, so in the future I'll have to go buy another one.)

The lectures were informative and easy to follow along with. Professor Lee strikes a good balance between conversational and scientific language, and I never felt like class was boring. I would characterize her as one of the younger, chill profs in personality (if that makes any sense), but she definitely expects the best from you, so try not to be late for class or procrastinate. With it being a small class, she gets to know everyone on an individual basis pretty well, which was nice. Lecture was sometimes audio recorded (no video), depending on if she could get the wifi to cooperate, but I feel like it was more worthwhile to just attend class anyways. The professor does office hours by appointment, and the TAs have drop-in OH.

Overall, I learned a lot in this class, and I'm glad I took it :)

-one midterm paper, one group oral presentation, one group final presentation, weekly mini quizzes
-little bit of bioinformatics in the beginning and then all wet lab
*Take this class (besides getting lab credit) if you:
-want to get DIFFERENT types of research experience (I was in a research lab and I mostly did protein stuff but in 104AL, you do more of DNA/RNA stuff)
-want to experience the wet lab life (ie. 8+ hrs in lab/week)
*Don't take this class (yet) if you:
-have a busy schedule
-don't work well in a team (there is a lot of group work and communication within your team)
*Tips:
-know your team mates early on
-keep your non-lab days relatively free in the afternoon because if you fail experiments, its really helpful for you to come in and catch up
-communication!!
-read the manual before lab/class
-plan with your group esp. the last couple weeks

Great GE! Professor Lee was great. The subject matter was interesting and the work was easy.

This is one of the best classes I've taken, and by far my favorite I've taken at UCLA. I highly recommend taking this class with Dr. Lee, it's incredibly interesting and Dr. Lee is a lovely professor.

LECTURES
Lectures were held asynchronously for the most part, with 2-3 synchronous lectures. It was very nice to get to connect with Dr. Lee during these synchronous lectures, and helped restore the feeling of a normal class. For the asynchronous lectures, I typically just looked to the slides and took notes from them, going back to the lecture occasionally if an assignment question references something I missed.

DISCUSSIONS
Discussions were optional and honestly, I only attended about 3-4 of them (which I feel bad about because I really loved my TA). Typically we would just go over and answer questions from the readings and lectures that week and sometimes discuss in breakout rooms what we thought/answer questions the TA provided for us -- which we would put on a slide and then go over with the rest of the class/slides in the main room.

ASSIGNMENTS/READINGS
At the end of each week, there were assignments on CCLE regarding the class's content from the week prior (usually about 3-4 questions, as the quarter went on there would be less and less each week but the appropriate responses would get longer for each question). They were never too hard, could always be answered using the lectures/readings from that week and sometimes were opinion-based. I would usually just skim the readings and it never really caused any problems.

MIDTERM PAPER
This was no problem for me, just start early and address the prompt fully. We had about two weeks to do it, and I got a really great grade just from managing my time with preparing it and the content I included.

FINAL GROUP PROJECT
This wasn't too bad either, you and your group are assigned a degenerative disease that could potentially be treatable with stem cell therapy and you could make a poster, website, or a 15 minute video about the disease following guidelines provided by Dr. Lee. Compared to other finals, this was incredibly easy.

No tests or quizzes and an incredible manageable workload; I can't recommend this class enough. :-)