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Biology in Popular Culture is a brand-new course offered by the Gottwald Center for the Sciences and is taught by Dr. Paula Lessem. The course is designed for non-science majors in order to fulfill the university's gen-ed requirement for science.

Thankfully, the material never gets too in-depth, instead focusing on the practical uses of popular aspects of biology such as cloning, DNA forensics, genetic alterations, etc. We are even assigned to read Michael Crichton! (He's the guy who wrote Jurassic Park, for those of you who don't know). The book we have to read is called Next, which is a series of fictional vignettes chronicling the latest advances in science. The material is very interesting and it closely pertains to the topics covered in class.

There is no officially assigned textbook for the course and the classes themselves are lecture-based with daily PowerPoint presentations, so taking good notes is a must. This also means that skipping class is not a good idea.

Like any science course, there is also a 3-hour lab that meets once a week. While they can sometimes get dull and repetitive, the labs are never too difficult and the lab professor (Maren Reiner) is very nice.

University of Richmond Arts & Sciences: Biology

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