Teachers' group brings genomics revolution to minority colleges.

摘要

When the human genome sequence was released in 1999, it meant two things to Edison Fowlks, a biology professor at Hampton University in Virginia. First, genomics technologies were about to revolutionize science. And second, students and faculty of so-called minority-serving institutions such as Hampton, a historically black college, needed to be part of the revolution. But where were such institutions going to come up with the funds to train faculty in the new technologies-much less buy microarrays and the scanners needed to read them? In 2004, Fowlks found an answer when he met fellow biologist A. Malcolm Campbell, who since 2000 had been organizing a program called Genome Consortium for Active Teaching (GCAT) for faculty at small undergraduate institutions. Campbell is himself a researcher at Davidson College in North Carolina, a liberal arts college with 1,700 students.