1/30/2007 7:40:00 AM High-tech biology in high school
By Kelly Westhoff
Minnetonka seniors study DNA
Bioinformatics analysis techniques.
Sound high tech? It is. Yet six Minnetonka High School seniors do not shy from this complicated term. They embrace it.
In December, the students - all seniors in the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs at Minnetonka High School - traveled to Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., along with three teachers.
Once there, they participated in unique, hands-on learning experiences at the Dolan DNA Learning Center.
The center, which is located on Long Island, offers workshops for science teachers and students from across the country. It is a part of the internationally-recognized Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory where James Watson works. In 1962, Watson won the Nobel Prize for his co-discovery of DNA's double-helix structure with Francis Crick.
The Minnetonka students toured Watson's laboratory and an on-site museum featuring the global history of scientists' efforts to map the structure of DNA, but the real reason the students traveled to New York was to learn new skills.
Under the guidance of Dolan Center staff, the students collected scrapings from their own cheeks, then separated their DNA from their cheek cells.
With the help of some high-tech tools, they replicated their DNA until they each had a sizable amount. This allowed the students to prepare their own slides and study their individual DNA sequences.
Lastly, their samples were anonymously added to and stored on the center's DNA database, where they are available for use by any scholar or student in the world with an Internet connection.
After studying their DNA, Haley Eidem, one of the students, discovered that among her peers, she was the most closely related to the Romanovs, the last of the Russian czars. Eidem laughed off the claim to fame, preferring instead to talk about the actual lab work she'd done. "I really liked the hands-on perspective I got," she said. "Doing the DNA replication was intense. The steps were painstaking."
"It was really exciting to see professional researchers in the field," Eidem added. "It really gave meaning to my future, to what I hope to be."
Like Eidem, Miriam Ramliden can also picture a career in science. "Being there really made science something we can actually do; it's not just an abstract," she said.
For her, a highlight of the trip was learning about groundbreaking environmental research being done by one of the center's staff. A researcher there, Ramliden explained, is extracting DNA sequences from sea sponges and using that information to develop a technique that will combat the decomposition of wooden piers.
For John Cossette, another of the Minnetonka students, the mental stimulation the trip provided was most exciting. "We were doing really high-level thinking," he said, "and that was really neat for me. We were doing this high-tech, cutting-edge stuff. Any of us going into biology is going to be using this technology."
Dawn Norton, one of the participating teachers and the trip's initiator, beamed as the students spoke. "The kids really got to feel the excitement of being a practicing scientist. It felt real and relevant to them because it was," she said. "They got great hands-on experiences we just can't give them in our classrooms. One of the machines they used costs half a million dollars."
Norton was able to arrange the trip with help from the Minnetonka Public Schools Foundation, a non-profit organization that raises independent funds to support innovative programs in the Minnetonka district.
Students were nominated by their interdisciplinary teachers as program candidates. Science teachers made the final selection by choosing participants who showed a particular ability and interest in science.
The Minnetonka group, Norton said, was the first group from Minnesota to attend workshops at the Dolan Center. Most high school participants, she explained, are from East Coast districts.
Once there, Dolan added, she and the students learned about the center's numerous programs. A couple of the students, she said, showed interest in the center's collegiate-level summer internships, plus she learned about the center's DNA summer boot camp for teachers, a three-week seminar that educates teachers on new DNA technologies.
Even though the trip to the Dolan Center and the learning that happened there were exciting, it was just one half of Norton's proposed program; the other half is yet to come. This spring, the six participating Minnetonka seniors will help plan lessons used in junior biology classes. They will even help teach some of the activities as well.
"We're really excited to get a student eye view in planning curriculum," Norton said.
Not only will the Minnetonka juniors get to hear first-hand about the process of collecting DNA from faces they know, they will also log into the Dolan Center's online DNA database and study their fellow students' DNA.
To learn more about the Dolan DNA Learning Center, visit www.dnalc.org.
To learn more about the Minnetonka Public Schools Foundation, visit www.minnetonkafoundation.com.
