GENE DATA ALTER FOCUS OF BIOLOGY CLASSES.

Byline: Sandra Blakeslee The New York Times

Remember high school biology? Most questions were about Mendel's sweet peas, animal family trees and that yucky frog floating in formaldehyde, awaiting dissection.

Times have changed. Today, teachers say, biology students are asking different sorts of questions: Is there a gay gene? A fat gene? A mean gene? Is there a genetic reason that so many teen-agers commit suicide? If my mother's younger sister has breast cancer, will I get it, too?

Such questions are on the minds and lips of students in schools all across the country, educators say. Information pouring out of the Human Genome Project is revolutionizing the teaching of biology as new genes are found every day.

The situation is akin to the late 1950s after Sputnik was launched and American education was thrown into crisis mode, said Dr. Joe McInerney, director of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, a nonprofit agency in Colorado Springs that develops teaching materials.

But molecular genetics and a Pandora's box of ethical, legal and social questions arising from its success are driving the change now, McInerney said.

To cope with these challenges, young people need a deeper knowledge of how life is organized, biologists say. They need new metaphors that explain the interplay between genes, cells, organisms and the environments in which they interact.

"It's not that Mendel is wrong," McInerney said, referring to the 19th-century monk who founded modern genetic theory.

"But his explanation has always been incomplete." For example, many unorthodox modes of inheritance have been discovered recently, including imprinting, mitochondrial genetics and trinucleotide repeats. Genes are not stable. They jump around, swap places, reshuffle. One gene can make more than one protein.

Thirty years ago, biology students spent most of their time memorizing the names of phyla or cell parts, McInerney said. Indeed, high school biology students learned more new words than did students taking a first-year language course. But rote memorization does not educate students about biology, McInerney said. Today they need to learn that DNA is an information molecule and that this information can be used for good and bad purposes.

Ken Bingman, a biology teacher at Shawnee Mission West High School in Shawnee Mission, Kan., said of his classroom: "We still spend some time on pea plants but move very quickly into humans. Most kids wouldn't know a pea plant if they met one. But they do know and care about human traits."

They are curious about athletic ability, intelligence and other aspects of being human that relate directly to them. "Our hook is the understanding of how these traits are inherited," Bingman said.

Diana Doepkin, who teaches biology at the Air Academy High School in Colorado Springs, said that most of her students knew someone with cystic fibrosis, Down syndrome or muscular dystrophy. Modern genetics has immediate relevance for them, she said, and huge implications for their future should they ever be asked to undergo medical tests for insurance or a job.