Learning to talk the language is no cakewalk: executives confront a "polymerase chain reaction and gel electrophoresis" experiment. Photo: Les Todd

eter Jensen doesn't pretend to be a biotech expert. Although he works for a major pharmaceutical firm, Merck & Co., Inc., in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, Jensen is an electrical engineer by training. So, when he became a procurement manager in charge of buying lab supplies and drug materials for Merck in early 2003, he knew he was in trouble. "I was a fish out of water," he says.

Then Jensen heard about Duke's Biotechnology for Business program, an intensive five-day seminar offered every spring. The seminar, which organizers bill as the Rolls Royce of science training programs for business professionals, is designed to teach fundamental scientific and technical concepts to nonscientists. Intrigued by the idea, Jensen signed up and flew to Durham last May.

A week later, tired but still enthusiastic, Jensen drove off to RDU airport a satisfied customer. After day upon twelve-hour day of rigorous classes and labs on such topics as genetics, molecular biology, pharmacology, chemistry, bioengineering, the human genome project, and bioinformatics, he felt as if he could finally understand and appreciate the science behind the life-sciences business. The true test came at the airport as he waited for his flight back to New Jersey. Opening a biotech trade magazine that he had never been able to decipher before, he found that it actually made sense to him now.

"I knew what they were talking about," he says, still somewhat astounded. "It was amazing the difference that five days make. When I read it before, it was so far removed from my knowledge that I couldn't make heads or tails of most of it."

Drop and Give Me 36

Jensen is one of hundreds of midcareer business types who have taken the Biotechnology for Business course since Duke started offering it in 1994. Some forty professionals, or their companies, shell out up to $4,600 a pop each May for the little-known but highly acclaimed program, one of the few of its kind in the world. (This year's program is slated for May 2-6.) The eclectic list of participants typically includes both the expected--biotech and pharmaceutical managers--and some surprises: financial officers, venture capitalists, patent attorneys, private investors, headhunters, and government officials. They come from around the globe: Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Scandinavia, and The Netherlands. "We've had participants from every continent except Antarctica," says Michael C. Pirrung, a chemistry professor at Duke who founded the biotech program ten years ago and still runs it.

"We thought we would get a lot of CEOs and CFOs from biotech companies, but rarely do we get those executives anymore," says Pirrung. "Most biotech executives have biotech backgrounds these days. So, now we get attorneys who don't have science backgrounds or investment bankers or industry analysts. We also get a lot of people from marketing departments."

"I think a lot of people are going there to learn enough about the science to connect the dots to commercial applications," says Curt Brewer, a Raleigh business lawyer with no science background, whose firm, Kennedy Covington Lobdell & Hickman LLP, has started working with biotechnology start-ups. Peggy Low, senior vice president of technology for the Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce, decided to come after watching the Piedmont Triad's pool of life-science firms steadily grow to nearly fifty over the past few years. She thinks the course will give her group a leg up in efforts to entice biotech firms to the Triad and foster a more supportive environment for the companies already there.

"I really felt I needed a better understanding of what they did," says Low, who has a liberal-arts background and an M.B.A., but little science training. "If I can talk the language, I can better communicate with them and better recruit them."

As the program participants quickly discover, learning to talk the language is no cakewalk. On an average day, the Biotechnology for Business program consists of six or seven hour-long lectures at the Sanford Institute, plus lab experiments, technology demonstrations, and discussion groups. Program participants also receive custom-made course texts the size of small phone books, detailing all of the material covered in the lectures.

In the classroom, a team of seven instructors led by Pirrung set a grueling pace. On the first full day, the emphasis is heavily on cell biology and genetics. Haifan Lin, an associate professor of cell biology at Duke Medical Center, and Theresa O'Halloran, an assistant biology professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a former Duke instructor, take turns teaching about such weighty concepts as the four basic types of gene mutations and nucleotides and the transcription of DNA.