Genomics in school

Abstract

School curricula always lag behind scientific innovations; modern science has made so many great advances that the quantity of ‘basic’ science to be taught in the classroom increases year on year. Major breakthroughs and new research are obvious in a range of scientific disciplines, including medicine, forensics, biofuels, vaccine research and the mitigation of pollution (NGI , 2006). Moreover, fundamental biological concepts and practices have themselves advanced and school curricula need to be revised; for example, in evolutionary biology (Moore, 2007), probable evolutionary relationships are now being constructed by comparing proteins and genome sequences between organisms, rather than by searching for similarities in anatomy, embryology and physiology.