Many efforts are underway to increase society's awareness of the enormous potential of modern genetics and the Human Genome Project. The Departments of Molecular Biotechnology and Medical History and Ethics at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA are contributing to these efforts through an outreach program targeted at high school teachers and their students. Like the Human Genome Project itself, this program includes both scientific and ethics components. The scientific component allows students to participate directly in sequencing the human genome, and the ethics component guides students to consider the social and ethical implications of genetic research and genetic testing.

Because of the interest exhibited in this program beyond our area, we have prepared this document to help establish teacher-scientist partnerships in other communities. The purpose of this package is to help the set-up of new high school sequencing sites by providing our protocols, a list of kit contents and some hints and classroom strategies to carry out these experimental modules in high school classrooms. The ethics curriculum is also presented in this package. These units are works in progress and may undergo some modification in the future. We welcome your comments on these materials and look forward to hearing about your classroom experiences.

The materials have been divided into three sections:
I. Role of the Teacher-Scientist Partnership
II. Description of Modules
III. Appendices

This program is supported by a grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Past grants from the Department of Energy and by a local PIPE (Partners in Public Education) grant from the Seattle School District have also supported the High School Human Genome Program. We would like to thank the following suppliers for providing us with generous gifts and discounts: Bio-Rad, New England Biolabs, DNASTAR Inc., Fisher Scientific, Life Technologies, Amersham-Life Science and Boehringer-Mannheim.

For further information, please contact:

Dr. Maureen Munn, Director, High School Human Genome Program
Department of Genome Sciences
University of Washington
Box 352145
Seattle, WA 98195-2145