Local News in Brief : Biologist Wins Grant to Keep Teachers Current

Aprofessor at California State University, Northridge has been awarded more than $390,000 in federal grants for a program to keep Los Angeles science teachers up-to-date on developments in biology.

The teacher-training program, called “Advances in Biological Sciences,” will receive National Science Foundation science-education grants over the next three years, said Steven Oppenheimer, who directs the program and the CSUN Center for Cancer and Developmental Biology.

Forty science teachers from the Los Angeles Unified School District will meet at CSUN for one day every other week during the school year and for one week each summer to hear presentations by leading scientists, including Nobel laureate Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA, Oppenheimer said.

Highlights of the program will be included in a book that will be given to every science teacher in the school system, he said.

In a field where “almost every day, there are major new developments,” teachers are hard pressed to keep up, Oppenheimer said. “The typical high school biology textbook is way behind,” he said.

A survey showed that recombinant DNA technology--the basis of the current revolution in biotechnology--was not mentioned in several of the major new 1985 biology textbooks, he said.