To the Editor:

Your editorial in the December issue1 argues that the education of the next generation of biotechnologists should include active development and cultivation of entrepreneurial skills. It is suggested that while the success of early biotech breakthroughs has seen “many academic institutions set up teaching programs to capture the rapid advances being made in recombinant technology,” the majority of these programs have “largely ignored the mysteries of commercialization”. I believe this is true.

Most educational programs in science, particularly those within academia, tend not focus on how to relate work done in the laboratory to the 'real' (commercial) world outside those walls. What I would argue, however, is that any shift in education to include the cultivation of entrepreneurial skills should be accompanied by an equal emphasis on the development of programs, courses and exercises in how to communicate with the public and reflect on potential social and ethical aspects of the work in question.

These skills represent a vital element of what it takes to achieve commercial success in today's post-genetic-modification (GM)-controversy world. This is already being recognized in the emerging field of nanotechnology, in which new educational programs (be they at a high school, bachelor or postgraduate level) are including information and activities relating to social dimensions and ethical questions around the science. In nanotechnology, this emphasis on the importance of scientists being aware of and engaging with these types of issues is said to be based on 'learning the lessons' of what happened with biotech, specifically the controversy surrounding GM crops. The key idea here is that commercial success is not only about what you can do, but also about what society thinks you should do. For the next generation of biotechnologists to be educated as successful entrepreneurs, I would argue that they, too, need to learn the lessons from controversies in their field and find ways to incorporate the cultivation of skills in social and ethical reflection into their education. Without this, they run the serious risk of their products lacking one of the most crucial elements for success, that of social robustness.