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An Overseas Life Sciences Attachment Opportunity at Monsanto Company, Chesterfield Research Facilities, St Louis, MO, USA.

Under the sponsorship of the Ministry of Education and the National Science and Technology Board of Singapore I was selected and sent to Monsanto Company, Chesterfield, St Louis, Missouri USA.

During my time there I was attached directly to the Model Crops Group and spent time learning the Techniques of Plant Tissue Culture as well as Plant Transformation. What inevitably happened was that I begin to learn more about plants in general both at the level of the taxonomy and biochemistry of plants.

I also came to be more aware of the various stages of getting a transgenic plant - from identifying the candidate gene to the time it gets to the farmer's field. Also apparent were all the safety considerations and the level of thoroughness that is required and put in throughout the 10 to 15 years that this whole transgenic crop development process takes.

Much time was also spent in discussions of possibilities on how and what I learnt here can be adapted for classroom teaching. This included working on possible systems for the junior college laboratory.

Monsanto Company was also the host of the Scientific Meeting by the Society for Invitro Biology and one of the sessions they had was specifically for teachers. There were two hands on workshops as to how to introduce Molecular Biology into the classroom as well as student presentation by 5 groups of high school students and what they did for their science projects in the area of the Life Sciences.

Andrew Tan
12th July 2001