Advances in genomics are beginning to force changes in education. An example is the new Princeton University undergraduate science curriculum, which David Botstein helps lead (pictured left). After working at MIT, Genentech, and Stanford University, he became director in 2003 of Princeton's Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, one of several US centers of systems biology.
The new curriculum takes off from the inextricable pairing of biology and computation in genomics and much of the rest of biology, with the consequence that newcomers need to be bilingual in biology and computation, as well as in the mathematics, physics and chemistry which deal in the same fundamental processes. "The genome, of course, would have been infeasible without computation." Botstein says. In the first year, all Princeton students aiming at a career in science take four courses together, then two more in their sophomore year before they pick their majors.
"My view is ...
