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November 26, 2007
Biotech buzzYou can't be in the education world these days without hearing the familiar refrain about students' preparedness for a global marketplace. How will they compete? Will U.S. companies have to go abroad to find employees with the skills necessary to fill their jobs? What can we do to get ahead and stay ahead? BoardBuzz has certainly heard it all before.
But one teacher in San Francisco has his finger on the pulse and is preparing his students for the biotech field in a very unique way. This article in the New York Times details the story of George Cachianes and his innovative approach to biotechnology.
More than a decade ago, after George Cachianes, a former researcher at Genentech, decided to become a teacher, he started a biotechnology course at Lincoln High School in San Francisco. He saw the class as way of marrying basic biotechnology principles with modern lab practices — and insights into how business harvests biotech innovations for profit.If you’re interested in seeing the future of biotechnology education, you might want to visit one of George Cachianes’s classrooms. “Students are motivated by understanding the relationships between research, creativity and making money,” he says.
Lincoln has five biotech classes, each with about 30 students. Four other public high schools in San Francisco offer the course, drawing on Mr. Cachianes’s syllabus. Mr. Cachianes, who still teaches at Lincoln, divides his classes into teams of five students; each team “adopts” an actual biotech company.
The students write annual reports, correspond with company officials and learn about products in the pipeline. Students also learn the latest lab techniques. They cut DNA. And recombine it. They transfer jellyfish genes into bacteria. They purify proteins. They even sequence their own cheek-cell DNA.
BoardBuzz is impressed. And it's not just San Francisco either. In Mesa, Ariz., they're doing it too.
“Our whole goal is to transform the work force,” says Xan Simonsen, who coordinates the biotech program for high schools in Mesa, Ariz. The schools follow a curriculum very similar to San Francisco’s, including an emphasis on learning about the biotech business.To be sure, biotech lab work is expensive. Mr. Cachianes’s classroom in San Francisco has about $500,000 of equipment, obtained mainly through grants and donations from local companies. (The spending total was similar for the Mesa district’s biotech labs.)
Perhaps most important is the philosophy Mr. Cachianes holds, one that should be a "no brainer" -- that if we believe in our students and push them, they can achieve. "The lesson here is that seeds of innovation are sown in high school — and that setting higher expectations can encourage better performance. 'Our kids can shatter limits,' Mr. Cachianes says, 'if we adults take a risk and give them the chance to try.'”
Posted November 26, 2007 4:17 PM | Curriculum
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