Filling the Pipeline

Photo: Myrna E. WatanabeBoston University's "MobileLab," a bus outfitted with biotech lab equipment, visited the Connecticut state capitol in Hartford May 1, the day Connecticut United for Research Excellence announced plans for a like vehicle called "Connecticut's BioBus." In 1999, the U.S. biotechnology industry employed 153,000 people, up 48.5 percent from 1995, according to Ernst & Young. In the state of Connecticut alone, total bioscience (biotech and pharmaceutical) R&D expenditures equaled more than $2.6 billion in 1999, a 75 percent increase above 1995 expenditures. Total bioscience R&D employment in Connecticut is more than 12,000 people, a 42 percent growth over 1995. Such exponential industrial growth raises a question: Who is going to fill these jobs in the future? Already there are not enough traditional students (those who decide that they want a career in scientific research and go on to get master's and doctoral degrees) to fill the job openings. Bioscience firms in Connecticut, for example, "are all feeling a pinch in their workforce," notes Debra Pasquale, president of Connecticut United for Research Excellence Inc. (CURE), a not-for-profit membership organization in Rocky Hill that promotes bioscience in the state. Biotech firms and research labs are finding that they are better off filling skilled technician-level jobs, traditionally filled by people with master's and doctoral degrees, with people with lower-level degrees and specific training. Postdocs, who often have served as technicians, "stay for a very brief period and they move on. Someone who's actually trained to be a technician tends to stay at the company for a longer time," remarks Elaine Johnson, director of Bio-Link, a National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education Center for Biotechnology, located at City College of San Francisco. Bio-Link has regional centers throughout the United States that work with community colleges to establish and support training programs in biotechnology. And teachers, personnel firms, and research organizations are finding that less-degreed people--even high school grads--if appropriately trained, can fill these technician-level jobs and do the work well. At the BIO2000 conference held March 26-30 in Boston, Nicole Barna, director of operations for the Genome Center at the Whitehead Institute/MIT Genome Center in Cambridge, Mass., noted that since March of 1999, her firm hired 151 new employees. Of these, 84 were lab assistants, all of whom had community college backgrounds. And because nearby biotechnology firms were competing for the same employees, "It was definitely a struggle to retain these [lab assistant] employees," Barna said. High School Tech At BIO2000, community college teachers and program administrators got together to discuss the successes of their biotechnology technician training programs. Among the teachers was Judi Heitz, the biotechnology coordinator for the San Diego City Schools. Heitz, who formerly worked for Immunex, convinced the San Diego school system to let her begin a training program using the facilities of San Diego City College, which is next door to San Diego High School. Although the concept is so new to the school system that Heitz says she has no academic or administrative support, she is reaching out to "nontraditional" students in the heavily Latino school district. These students would be the first generation in their families to attend college. Many of them, she explains, cannot afford to go to four-year colleges and don't understand that they can get financial aid to do so. With the attitude that "anyone can do DNA isolation," Heitz is giving her students--who have to take biology and algebra, although they need not pass the latter--the skills and confidence to take jobs in the nearby biotech industry or to go on to college. The students, she finds, are often so motivated that they will skip their regular high school classes to attend her class. And Heitz has found an added perk to the program: The high school and college, which had never interacted, are suddenly talking to each other, creating opportunities for other interactions. From left, Jo-Anne Hongo, Genetech research scientist and instructor at City College of San Francisco; Mai Du, biotechnology student and Genecor employee; and Elaine Johnson, director of Bio-Link. Community College Programs The state of California is so enthralled with the prospect of community colleges training students for high-tech jobs, the California Community College chancellor's office has committed $33.1 million to a program called ED>Net (Economic Development Network). Biotechnology is one of the 10 ED>Net initiatives, with a total of $1.1 million in state funding, according to Kim Perry, state director, biotechnology, for ED>Net. There are six biotechnology centers on six campuses statewide, organized to assist community colleges interested in incorporating biotechnology into their curricula. These centers work not only with the community colleges, but also with industry and with high school teachers to establish a pipeline to get students from high school to community college to jobs. Community colleges, according to Johnson, also are supplying nontraditional students to the bioscience industries. "Most of the people are more mature students; the average age at community colleges across the country is 29," she says. Speaking of her students at City College of San Francisco, she notes, "Many of these students have degrees already in English, sociology, photography. One person was a bike messenger in San Francisco for seven years; another was a bartender." Getting Them Early To interest kids in science, "You've got to get them early," says Boston University School of Medicine's (BUSM's) CityLab director Connie Phillips. Environmental scientist Robert Wallace and pediatric dentist Robert North take this literally. Wallace and North, who is executive director of Boys Harbor Inc., an educational and counseling services program on the north end of Manhattan's Upper East Side and the south end of East Harlem, are opening a public school, the Harbor Science and Arts Charter School, in September. The school initially will cover grades one through six, adding seventh grade in September 2001 and eighth in September 2002. "We take science seriously," notes the school's brochure--and parents must feel this way, too. "We had 400 applicants for 132 spots," says North. The students at Harbor will continue programs Boys Harbor currently carries out with New York City Board of Education's Community District Four: analyzing water of the Harlem Meer, the lake at the north end of Central Park; downloading and broadcasting weather reports from the National Weather Service; and pilot testing a national biodiversity curriculum with the American Museum of Natural History. Other cultural institutions in New York City and its vicinity will be collaborating with the school, which is accepting children from throughout the city. The school is fully computerized and all students and faculty will have Internet access. "We [Wallace and North] have a bent toward the sciences," North, who also is director of pediatric dentistry at Harlem Hospital Center, says. "We agree that science is important, technology is important. That's what the world's going to be about." --Myrna E. Watanabe Some biotech associate program grads, such as Mary A. Goyette, who discussed her technician job at the Whitehead Institute--working on genomic library construction--at BIO2000, were initially trained as medical technologists. Goyette was hired out of the Biotechnology Program at New Hampshire Community Technical College (NHCTC) in Portsmouth. The Whitehead was so pleased with her work, it went back to NHCTC and asked the program director, Sonia Sparks Wallman, "Have you got any more of these folks?" It eventually hired five NHCTC program grads. NHCTC's program, which includes a virtual workplace (physical space equipped and arranged like an industrial laboratory), is funded by an NSF Advanced Technological Education (ATE) grant. Students graduating from the program will be competent in techniques used in the industry, including: DNA, RNA, and protein electrophoresis; RFLP (restriction fragment length polymorphism) and PCR methods; Southern and western blots; gene cloning; and gene expression control. There is an illustrated, online virtual laboratory, complete with access to all virtual equipment and supplies necessary to complete any protocol. Jobs in the Boston biotechnology corridor are within commuting distance. Austin Community College (ACC) in Texas understands that its biotechnology program students may need jobs before they complete the program. The school offers a one-year certificate in media preparation and/or bioprocessing. According to Linnea Fletcher, Bio-Link South Central Region director at the college, students may get a job in industry after the first year of study, then complete the second year of the program, which leads to an associate of applied science (A.A.S.) degree. ACC gives the employer a guarantee, explained Fletcher at BIO2000: The employer must be satisfied, or the school will train the student free. To make sure the college doesn't have to make good on this promise, the program requires that students show competency in each of six core courses before they can move on to the next course. But Fletcher noted that ACC's problem is its pipeline of students. To ensure sufficient enrollment, the college is working closely with local high schools to motivate students "who never thought they were interested in science." It offers a one-year Introduction to Biotechnology that exposes high school students to the different areas of the field. ACC also partners with nearby University of Texas, Austin (UT-Austin), which allows community college grads to move seamlessly into a four-year program. This helps UT-Austin recruit nontraditional students while giving it access to some of ACC's financial resources; ACC has access to the equipment and facilities at UT-Austin. Photo: Myrna E. WatanabeCarl Franzblau of Boston University School of Medicine inside MobileLab on May 1 in Hartford. A Different Approach While ACC's access to high schools is helping it, other colleges might benefit from similar programs. Connie Phillips, director of Boston University School of Medicine's (BUSM's) CityLab, a hands-on laboratory serving Massachusetts middle and high school students and teachers, realizes that BU's attempt to recruit undergraduates by going into high school classrooms "didn't have any effect." In 1988, its program received a grant for teacher workshops from a quasi-state organization, Bay State Skills, Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education. The teacher workshops generated such excitement that BUSM biochemistry department chair Carl Franzblau suggested that BUSM develop a laboratory that could travel to schools. The BUSM MobileLab--a bus outfitted with state-of-the-art biotech laboratory equipment--funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Research Resources and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, rolled out in January 1998. The bus travels to middle and high schools, especially in the Boston area, and supplements the schools' science programs. It can handle 24 students at a time, and they engage in complex laboratory experiments designed to hold their interest and teach them that "science is fun and science is not that hard," says Phillips. The bus is used for teacher training, community involvement, and even company training. "We'll do K to gray," quips Phillips. The BUSM bus visited Farmington High School in Connecticut in Oct. 1998 for teacher training, and, says Pasquale of CURE, "We intuitively knew that this was going to make sense to us." On May 1, CURE announced a $3 million, five-year, public-private partnership to build Connecticut's BioBus, supported by Connecticut Innovations (the state's technology investment arm), four pharmaceutical companies, Yale University, University of Connecticut, the Connecticut State University System, and several biotechnology companies. The funding institutions are expected to commit a visiting scientist for the day to ride the bus and serve as a role model. They also hope to have college juniors or seniors from the funding universities so that high school students will see that science students are not different from them. The bus has made such a deep impression that the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, rolled out a bus of its own several weeks ago. MdBio, a bioscience industry group in Frederick, Md., has formed a consortium that includes itself, The Institute for Genetics Research (TIGR), and University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, to apply for an NIH Science Education Partnership Award to fund the project. They will know the results of their application in October. MdBio's goals for the bus include not only teacher and high school student training, especially in rural areas of the state where access to the biomedical research and industry complex is limited. Another goal is to teach school guidance counselors that "you don't need a Ph.D." to work in the biosciences, notes Stacey Emison, manager of MdBio's Industry Support Programs. And if any of these programs alert students of opportunities in biomedicine that they would not normally have considered, they are doing their job well. "Otherwise, this whole group of kids misses out because they aren't told that they can do it," says Emison. S Myrna E. Watanabe is a freelance science writer in Patterson, NY. Resources NIH National Center for Research Resources, Science Education Partnership Award information: www.ncrr.nih.gov NSF Advanced Technological Education program information: www.ehr.nsf.gov/ehr/due/programs/ate Bio-Link: www.Bio-Link.org Linnea Fletcher of Austin Community College may be reached at linneaf@austin.cc.tx.us. Boston University CityLab: www.bumc.bu.edu/citylab California Community College Economic Development Network (ED>Net): ednet.cc.ca.us or tel.: (800) 344-3812 City College of San Francisco www.ccsf.cc.ca.us Connecticut United for Research Excellence Inc. (CURE) www.curenet.org For information about The Harbor Science and Arts Charter School, contact Robert Wallace at Rwallace@boysharbor.org. MdBio: www.mdbio.org New Hampshire Community Technical College: biotech.tec.nh.us Textbook Lisa A. Seidman and Cynthia J. Moore, Basic Laboratory Methods for Biotechnology: Textbook and Laboratory Reference, Upper Saddle River, NJ, Prentice Hall, 2000.

Filling the Pipeline

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