A new senior honors science course asks students to consider Bioethics as they learn new technology
By Lisa Catterall
Eighth Grade and High School Science Instructor
Last year, I was in the middle of taking a small group of seniors though the College Board AP Biology curriculum. One day, our Biotechnology unit turned into a discussion of Monsanto’s lawsuit against a canola farmer in Canada. The farmer used his own heirloom seeds, but pollen from the farm next-door containing Monsanto’s patented round-up-ready genetic technology blew into his field. Monsanto lawyers successfully put him out of business, claiming he stole their technology.
The students were horrified by this case. They wanted to discuss the philosophy behind the event, and the ethics of genetics. In short, they became fascinated by Bioethics.
For years I have wondered how humankind would manage to marry powerful advances in the manipulation of genes with a paucity of funding for the study of universal values and ethics. I believe this generation of students will need a deep understanding of these issues to be able to cast a confident vote on local issues. In our state, GMO labeling has been on the ballot. Is the slice of information included in AP Biology enough to create an educated citizen in the area of genetics? What about the students who only take lower-level courses in biology?
Our school has been wrestling with ways to address engagement during the senior year. The AP program has not seemed particularly relevant to the population we serve as an independent school; it was created as an access program for advanced students to complete a year or semester of college for free in high school. Typically, our students have no need to finish college in a short time and we strongly encourage them to take courses like Biology in college anyways, even if they pass the AP exam.
These considerations, and a recent visit to the Gandhi memorial in India, prompted me to design a new kind of senior science course, now approved by the UC system as an Honors senior-level science class with college-preparatory Biology, Chemistry, and Physics as prerequisites. On the same trip to India, we spoke with the Dalai Lama. His holiness stressed that as people worldwide turn away from organized religion (the statistics on this are staggering) every day, it will be up to educators to find a way to bring ethics and universal human values into the traditional curriculum. This idea seemed revolutionary, but in truth, it is already in practice at MMS in the Social Sciences program.
Mahatma Gandhi named seven social sins; the sixth was practicing “Science Without Humanity.” When I saw this carved in stone at Gandhi’s memorial in Delhi, it resonated as exactly what we are experiencing in some areas of Biotechnology in the U.S. My own background as a researcher at Genentech taught me the power of genetic tools as well as the potential value for mankind. How could I get students ready to face a world where we can manipulate living material as we can, and where students can perform genetic transformations in the lab by the time they are 16?
I felt that not allowing the students in my class time to explore this issue would be, in effect, denying their place in history. Particularly with the intrinsic awakening of their curiosity on an issue that is so timely for them, I could not push them away from the topic. Therefore, I guided the students in creating presentations on bioethics based on research, and each student came up with a debate or discussion topic on which the class as a whole spent time.
Through the high school science curriculum, students are given the basic building blocks to go forward and study science in college and beyond. In high school, at this critical time in students’ development of self-concept, students are not traditionally offered a comprehensive opportunity to consider science within a context of their own values. In a world where our technological capabilities may be expanding more quickly than our universal ethics (particularly in genetics), asking young people to consider how to use the tools they are offered is especially relevant. In addition, the traditional high school cannon in science offers no concentrated way of examining ourselves as human beings through the lens of science; most courses take biology, genetics, and basic sciences out of the context of relevance to the human experience. My students and I designed a course to address these issues.
The course provides the academic and research tools for students to examine where they came from in evolution and genetics and where they are currently within the global ecosystem. It asks them to examine how their choices affect their bodies, other human beings, and the planet, and how their lives and choices as global citizens can be informed by science. It also poses questions about how humans use the powerful technological tools available to them. After exposure to current research tools and current scientific thinking on human evolution, humans and the environment, humans as observers of the world, uses of technology, and bioethics, students are asked to execute a capstone project to further their learning in an area of their choice.
We titled the class “Science with Humanity” to reflect two meanings: practicing science while considering the effects of the tools on mankind, and learning about being human through science.
The course evolved into five units. In September, my students follow BioRad’s Secrets of the Rainforest lesson plan, which includes transformation, separations, and other lab techniques, as well as political, social, economic, and ethical study and discussion. In October, students use a college-level textbook on physical anthropology to study their evolutionary origins and their extant relatives. November brings a study of environmental science though the lens of the U.S. food system and current issues in industrial food production. Students then spend six weeks in a curriculum based on Rita Carters’ The Human Brain Book , focusing on the anatomy and body chemistry of consciousness, learning, emotion, and the social brain. Finally, students return to environmental science in a unit on how global human populations are affecting the planet. They are then given several months to design, implement, and deliver their own capstone project, going deeply into a cross-disciplinary topic that interested them from the first semesters’ curriculum.
Each unit of the class emphasizes a day-long discussion of bioethics around a topic that captures student interest. The course was approved with the topic-areas left open to allow for relevant and current issues to come into the science classroom as more than ancillary curriculum. The fact that the UC system was able to accept innovative and student-centered curriculum that samples from a variety of textbooks and literature is promising, particularly in the academic area of laboratory science.
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