NC’s Randy James receives national biotech teaching award

Even before “CSI” and other forensic science labs became part of nightly television viewing, students at North Central High School were interested in science and lab work.

Part of that may be because of the innovative teaching of Randy James, head of the biology department. Last week, James was given the 2004 Biotechnology Teaching Award by the National Association of Biology Teachers, the governing body for biology instructors for kindergarten through college.

James was presented with the award in Chicago at the organization’s annual conference.

“It’s exciting to see more and more students thinking of biology careers, a career in forensics or crime scene investigation and things like that. It will be interesting to see how that plays out,” James said.

“But there’s a huge need for scientists right now in the nation. About 90 percent of scientists are due to retire in the next 10 years, so our nation needs scientists, dramatically. The more we can get excited about science the better off we’ll be as a nation,” said James.

And James, 52, is definitely excited when it comes to biology.

James has been teaching for 27 years, 20 years at North Central and his first seven years at Ferris, where he graduated from high school in 1970 before graduating from the University of Oregon.

In 1999, James received the Outstanding Biology Teacher Award for Washington State.

James teaches advanced placement biology and biological solutions, which is a biotech course. The course is aligned with Eastern Washington University and students earn college credits.

Here’s where the innovative teaching comes in. The 30 students in James’ class have the opportunity to do what a research scientist would actually do in a lab.

“The first quarter is spent actually moving a gene. It’s call subcloning. We actually take a gene that’s in one piece of DNA and cut it out and move it to another piece of DNA and then prove that we actually moved the gene,” said James.

The school has acquired a sequencer that was used on a portion of the human genome. “We’re sequencing a particular segment of DNA from a very rare trout, a red band trout, the ancestral rainbow trout,” said James.

The class will take fin clips from salmon and trout from the Kamchatka peninsula in eastern Russia down to the Baja peninsula in Mexico. This will allow them to determine how the fish are related.

“That’s fairly innovative in that we’re actually having kids doing what’s called primary research, research that hasn’t been done. And we’ll be adding to the international database,” said James.