Biology teachers learn how to teach science with a conscience

Participants in UD’s in-service workshop on bioethics also had an opportunity to tour Delaware Biotechnology Institute research faciliities, including its 3-D visualization studio.

3:20 p.m., Nov. 8, 2004--When the Delaware Department of Education asked UD’s Delaware Biotechnolgy Institute (DBI) to set up an in-service workshop on how to teach bioethics in high school biology classes, more than half the high school biology teachers in Delaware signed up for it.

For their statewide professional development day, Oct. 8, Delaware’s 80 biology teachers could have chosen any one of many workshops across the state, but 45 chose to learn how to introduce the subject of ethics into their biology courses.

Jeanette Miller, coordinator at DBI, said, “Based on the evaluations completed by the participating teachers, they were very satisfied with the day.

“Teachers liked the format of the day, pairing a scientist and an ethicist and interspersing workshop/discussions with DBI laboratory visits. For example, one teacher commented that there were some holes in her understanding of stem cells, which were resolved in the course of the stem cell workshop,” Miller said.

In the workshop on “DNA, Identity and Privacy,” pairing Debra Mathews, of Johns Hopkins University’s Institute of Genetic Medicine, with Mark Greene, UD assistant professor of bioethics, Mathews explained how family traits, including those for disease and malformations, recycle through human genes. She used as an example a gene sequence—monoamine oxidase A, known as MAOA—that appears to be especially low in boys who have been abused.

“Boys with a genotype of low MAOA activity were twice as likely to be diagnosed with conduct disorder and three times as likely to be convicted of a crime by age 26 as those with high MAOA activity,” Mathews said. Those findings are the basis for evidence that MAOA levels may affect violence levels in white males, she said.

Greene explained how to introduce the question of the ethical use of genetic evidence and how to facilitate discussion. Then, he talked about the case of Stephen Mobley, who was convicted of murdering a night clerk during the armed robbery of a Domino’s Pizza. Mobley was convicted and sentenced to death, but he appealed his death sentence based on evidence of the MAOA gene mutation found in brutalized males.

Greene said to bring a bioethical question into the study of genes, teachers could describe MAOA’s use in the Mobley case asking about responsibility (Can genes undermine individual responsibility?), identity (Did Mobley do it or was it his genes?) and privacy (Who should know about these genetic tendencies? employers? the government?). One technique Greene suggested was to form a moot court to decide if Mobley was to blame or was compelled by a genetic tendency based on an abusive past.

Teachers in the workshop said they were impressed with the pairing a scientist and an ethicist and especially liked interspersing workshops, discussions and DBI laboratory tours. In their evaluations, one teacher commented that the day was "wonderful, all very usable," and another said the workshop was "a great resource for me and my students.”

DBI is planning more in-service workshops on a variety of topics.

Article by Barbara Garrison
Photo by Duane Perry

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