The Outer Limits of High School Biology

[Simon Holdaway]

Five years ago the sight of high school students tackling a Western blot would have been so unusual that it would garner attention from even the most cynical college professor. Ten years ago, the discovery of a thermal cycler sitting on a high school laboratory bench would have achieved the same thing. Twenty years ago, all it would have taken for the jaws to drop in the ivory towers was the discovery of a DNA electrophoresis rig at the local high school. Today, these procedures are routine in many high school biotechnology labs.

But where will it end? In these next two columns we examine the state of cutting edge high school biotechnology and debate the idea that we may be fast approaching the outer limits of the possible, and permissible, techniques high school students can successfully tackle. In twenty years DNA electrophoresis has gone from the research bench to an introductory lab technique for first year high school biology students. While thermal cyclers are still a luxury for many educational institutions, the frequency of loaner programs is increasing every year. At Virginia Tech the Fralin Biotechnology Institute has a loaner program that sends schools an entire molecular biology teaching kit in a box. Other institutions have similar programs. A Western blot, long the restrictive province of college facilities, has recently come to the high school curriculum. Both Biorad and Sargent-Welch (through Ellyn Daugherty’s textbook, Biotechnology, Science for the New Millennium) promote the Western blot technique and sell the reagents necessary for success.

In fact, lets us pause for a moment here and pay tribute to Biorad’s extraordinary Explorer program that has done more to popularize and elevate high school biotechnology than any other program. Conceived by Ron Mardigian more than 10 years ago, the program, backed by the resources of a multi-national life science research company, has revolutionized the instruction of high school biotechnology. From humble beginnings with the transforming pGLO plasmid, the program has matured and developed into a rich and varied offering with something for everyone. Novices and veterans alike can find useable and useful teaching kits. It helps that the individual Biorad kits are so utterly reliable, but the true significance of the Explorer program is how Biorad has incrementally increased our skills, and our comfort level, with ever more complex lab techniques.

The most recent biotechnology Explorer kit from Biorad is a series of experiments that leads students through the cloning, and subsequent sequencing, of a plant gene. Beginning with genomic DNA extraction, followed by PCR amplification of the target gene, with ligation, transformation, selection, and purification to follow, the labs lead the students through a maze of molecular biology techniques to the final product, a unique DNA sequence that can be submitted to Genbank. Indeed, Biorad is marketing the kit with the line “Have your students submit to Genbank.” While the program may have been developed at the college level, there is clearly no impediment to students in an advanced high school biology course tackling the project. With Biorad’s well-deserved reputation for reliability, the chances of success seem high. (Caveat; here at ATG we have not yet tested this product in a classroom setting).

So, what was once a six-month graduate student project has now become a sequence of six interconnected lab exercises suitable for advanced high school students. No wonder those college professors are impressed. With the exception of computer science I cannot think of an academic discipline where it is routinely possible for a college student to arrive at the gates of an institution of higher learning with a research project already under their belt that was more advanced and more complex than the professor’s own PhD thesis.

Thus, we arrive at the central conundrum of this article: ‘Where is the top?’ Can we, the educational community, continue to lead our students to ever higher plains of understanding and skill levels? On the one hand these new techniques elevate and reward the study of biology. The experiments get right to the heart of the matter, focus on the Central Dogma of Biology in ways that the old experiments never could, and undoubtedly prepare our students for science careers, or just help produce a more scientifically literate citizenry. (Note to self; that last goal is probably the most important)

In the second article of this series we will tackle what we believe to be the specific limits of high school biology, and the absolute maximum we can expect from our students.