In 1985, Barton Slatko at New England Biolabs and I were working on DNA sequencing, we published
some papers and we had this idea of doing a course because lots of people wanted to
come to our labs to learn DNA sequencing…and so we thought, well, it would be more efficient
doing a course rather than have people come see us individually..and it sort of evolved
from there.
We've successfully graduated over 4,000 students over the past 29 years.
So, the course curriculum since 1986 has evolved tremendously, so almost nothing is the same
as it was then…there have been a lot of advances like the polymerase chain reaction,
which have completely revolutionized what we do in the course…things like next gen
sequencing are completely new, of course.
The participants in the course often come in with very little molecular biology background,
so we need to teach them basics of DNA synthesis and, you know, DNA repair, transcription and
translation,,.and all of that…so they completely understand what's going on.
One of the things that we try to do is instead of just having steps, we try to have explanations
for why they're doing every single step…and in lecture, we do the same …we take them
through every step for every protocol and make sure they understand why they're doing
each step and what each reagent in the step is for…why it’s there and what it's doing…and
I think that's really important because when people have trouble with an experiment getting
it to work, if they understand why they're doing all the steps it makes it a lot easier
to troubleshoot.
You don't…you don't need any experience whatsoever, even when the students come to
us for the summer workshop, a lot of them don't have experience with micropipetting,
so we take them from the very beginning… and at the end they are, you know, they're
relatively experts in terms of molecular biology techniques that we’re teaching them.
We've had engineers, lawyers, patent attorneys, CEOs of companies who want to understand what
their researchers are doing, the backgrounds are really quite variable…we've even had
a few journalists come and take the course…who were science journalists, science writers,
who wanted to understand the biology…we’ve even converted a few physicists into biologists…so!
I thought it was fantastic…it was immediately appropriate and applicable to what I'm trying
to do with our biotechnology program at Groton School…so it was our wonderful in the sense
that it was completely hands-on…the lectures were informative and useful so the complete
package was immediately useful for me.
As an educator, you know, it's great to be able to do science, and published papers,
and make contributions that way, but as a teacher, you can impact the work done by hundreds
or thousands of people…so really, the most important thing about this course, to me,
is that we’ve had almost 4,000 people take this course now…so, you know, there's this
ripple effect, where as an individual, you can have some effect on science, but if you’re
a teacher, you have, you know, an impact that’s, I think, really hard to measure.