Lincoln's Biotech curriculum gets good press

Lincoln's outstanding biotech curriculum, pioneered at Lincoln by teacher George Cachianes and now replicated in other SFUSD schools, gets some much deserved good press in these two articles. The first one appeared in the Chron back on 11/17, followed by a feature in the NY Times.

Congratulations to everyone involved. This is not a flash in the pan, overnight success. This program has been building on its successes for years now. Let's hope it can be scaled up to thrive in other schools and has an impact on other science curricula throughout the district.

Chron: High school biowizards break new ground in winning competition

When Robert Ovadia got his invitation, he couldn't believe it.

He and four other students from his biotechnology class at Abraham Lincoln High School not only had an offer of paid summer lab jobs, they also would have a chance to square off against the world's powerhouse science universities.

NYTimes: English, Algebra, Phys Ed ... and Biotech

MORE than a decade ago, after George Cachianes, a former researcher at Genentech, decided to become a teacher, he started a biotechnology course at Lincoln High School in San Francisco. He saw the class as way of marrying basic biotechnology principles with modern lab practices — and insights into how business harvests biotech innovations for profit.

If you’re interested in seeing the future of biotechnology education, you might want to visit one of George Cachianes’s classrooms. “Students are motivated by understanding the relationships between research, creativity and making money,” he says.

Lincoln has five biotech classes, each with about 30 students. Four other public high schools in San Francisco offer the course, drawing on Mr. Cachianes’s syllabus. Mr. Cachianes, who still teaches at Lincoln, divides his classes into teams of five students; each team “adopts” an actual biotech company.