Leo Palmero, a biology teacher at North Rockland High School in Thiells, NY knows just what Wheeler means. He has taken the teaching of biology to a new level by incorperating the methods of the biotechnologist.
"When people talk about technology in the classroom, they frequently talk about computers," says Palmero. "I'm involved in biotechnology that is basicly using living organisims to produce useful products."
Palmero, who has been teaching for more than 30 years, has scraped together a very respectable biotechnology lab in his school by convincing medical technology companies to contribute expensive equipment and supplies. He uses it to emerse his students in science, with enormous economic and societal concequences. Of all modern science, biology has changed the most radically in the last two decades, and its influence on society-from food to forensics-is pervasive. Preparing students not only to enter the field, but to comprehend and evaluate its outcomes is critical.
Palmero's approach is excemplified by a project in which his advanced students seqence their own DNA. They use a technique used as polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, to amplify a small amount of DNA extracted from their own hair folicles. The PCR technique is one of the most important and common in modern biology. Anyone with even a passing interest in the OJ Simpson trial knows that DNA fingerprinting was amoung the forensic technologies brought on the case. PCR, notes Palmero, is a big part of that technology, and when students have a chance to utilize it first hand, they obtain a deep appreciation and understanding of its significance. They can, he says, extend their learning to a larger social and ethical context.