10 September 2002 17:35 EST

by Lois Wingerson

Quality training for the biologists of the future depends on liberating life-science programs from the pre-med template and especially from the criteria of the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT), according to a report from the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), released today.

Asking colleges to rethink their entire undergraduate life-science curricula, the NAS committee also called for a greater focus on chemistry, physics, and math, more interdisciplinary subject materials, and mathematical curricula that go beyond calculus and statistics to embrace other quantitative skills relevant to life science not only today but tomorrow.

"Most biology students of today are being prepared for the biology of the past, not the future," said Stanford University neurology professor Lubert Stryer, chairman of the committee that wrote the report. Experiments such as imaging molecular motors, unimaginable 20 years ago, are now being carried out by graduate students, he noted, yet many Bio 101 students learn little more than "factoids."

The NAS recommendations take particular aim at the demands of the MCAT, which "are hindering change in the undergraduate biology curriculum and should be reexamined." It is "by no means clear," the report concluded, that the current MCAT is "particularly relevant" even to future physicians. Thus it urged that the biology curriculum, currently skewed to the nominal needs of pre-med students, be allowed to develop in a manner beneficial to all students. Meanwhile, the committee urged that medical-school admission criteria be given an independent review - essentially, a reality check.

The NAS' recommendations are "very effective, maybe even brave," remarked Steve Rissing, professor of evolutionary biology at Ohio State University and director of its introductory biology program. "The stifling impact of the MCAT exam on undergraduate biology has been a major problem for decades."

They also struck a chord with Carol Manahan, a postdoctoral fellow in cell biology at Johns Hopkins University, who recalls from her undergrad days at Washington University in St. Louis that even if lectures didn't come straight from the MCAT crambook, many of the student's questions did. "I know that's true at Hopkins too," she said. It's not a conscious effort to focus on the MCAT but a demand driven by some students' determination to get into medical school.

Rather than focusing on facts, it's urgent to use hands-on teaching to prepare students to learn the facts they need for their own work as biologists, says James Gentile, dean of natural sciences at Hope College in Michigan. Geneticist Shirley Tilghman, who is president of Princeton University, agreed - for the "simple reason" that there are now too many life-science facts to teach. Inquiry-based learning is also critical, she said, in order to entice more students into life-science careers.

"Once you have tasted the thrill of knowing something nobody else knows about the natural world, you can't turn your back on that," Tilghman added. "It's an endorphin."

While the committee's recommendations are a step in the right direction, University of Michigan biology professor Dan Klionsky and several other observers argue that promoting interdisciplinarity and freeing life-science curricula from the MCAT don't go far enough. What's basically needed, they say, are major cultural changes such as overhauling tenure and compensation standards to recognize the importance of teaching.

One of the report's co-sponsors, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), has in fact been moving independently in this direction. (The other sponsor was the US National Institutes of Health.) Next week, HHMI will announce the names of its "million dollar professors," the first 20 grantees who will receive $1 million each year for "being as creative in their teaching as they are in their research," according to HHMI spokesperson Jennifer Donovan.

Even that won't be enough, contends Manahan, who is president of the Johns Hopkins Postdoctoral Association. "Yes, we need to attract good people to science. Coming up with interdisciplinary programs is important. But it's not the whole story," she said. It's critical to make science a more attractive profession for students after they graduate, with good working environments, fringe benefits, and higher income. Few students, especially minorities, will want to become life scientists, she asserts, if it means waiting until their mid-30s for a secure job that pays well.

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