GIFT Teacher Explores Cutting Edge Laboratory Research--and Related Ethical Issues
by Andrew Kerr
The CEISMC Gazette

About 30,000 people in the United States live with an incurable genetic disease called cystic fibrosis. Those afflicted often do not live past their mid-thirties. Lung infections generally deliver the final, fatal blow--one way to delay this is through a lung transplant, but the transplant itself is not a cure (less than half of lung transplant recipients live five more years).

Decatur High School teacher Amanda Lockhart teaches biology most of the year. But for the past three summers she has conducted research into gene therapy with a particular focus on cystic fibrosis in the labs at Georgia Tech's LeDoux Lab.

"The basics of gene therapy is transmitting a good gene into a cell so that you can either relieve or fix the misnomer," Amanda explains. "I worked with biomedical engineering graduate student Cindy Jung trying to make viruses cell-specific to target lung cells."

Some of the most interesting issues raised by gene therapy are the ethical ones, something that Amanda has made a major focus in her own classroom. "Gene therapy brings up issues of philosophy and ethics where you have to weigh the risks versus benefits, the pros versus the cons, your values and your focus on life. Some diseases allow you to take medication and be OK; with cystic fibrosis you either get a lung transplant or you die [and the lung transplant only temporarily staves off the effects of the disease]. But the problem with gene therapy is that it only has limited effects. It could end up not being a cure, just therapeutic in it's effects. If that is the case you could have to go the doctor numerous times for the treatment."

For two of the past three summers Amanda conducted her research as a Georgia Intern-Fellowships for Teachers (GIFT) fellow. She was funded by an NSF Career Award grant received by Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering Dr. Joseph LeDoux. The grant called on the recipient to develop education materials targeting some segment of the K-12 population. Dr. LeDoux decided to focus on a high school audience, and so Amanda was brought in.

Dr. LeDoux has benefitted from having Amanda in the laboratory. He has implemented several of Amanda's activities into his own college classrooms. "What she's bringing to Georgia Tech is a wealth of knowledge about educational techniques," he says. "I learned a lot about how to improve educational methods. I just sort of helped to develop the problems. Amanda took it an extra step and translated it into a way that it could be used with high school students. She had really creative ideas that were so good, so cool, and that really captured the imagination!"

Amanda says she has now abandoned "cookbook labs" in favor of allowing students to develop their own experiments. And one of the most interesting things Amanda has done is jettison the creaky, overly-elegant notion of "the scientific method," once de rigueur for biology teachers to introduce to their kids. "I got away from the scientific method and look instead at the nature of scientific inquiry and scientific processes," she says.

The mutually beneficial relationship resulted in Lockhart, LeDoux, and Jung winning a joint CETL 2005 Educational Partnership Award.

Amanda shared her knowledge of problem-based learning in a week-long CEISMC camp this past summer.

"GIFT is probably the best professional learning opportunity I've ever had," she says. "I have learned more in three summers than I have in all my other professional development."