Community

When Life Technologies first Global Quality Leadership Team Meeting was held in San Diego, California, last year, the group was pleasantly surprised to find out that the meeting’s typical get-to-know-you team-building exercise would also be a public service project. Forty-two individuals from around the world visited the San Diego Food Bank and broke into two competitive teams. Working together to understand each other's strengths, communicating, encouraging each other and using their quality experiences to visually inspect and sort food produced a successful outcome—for our employees and for the food bank. In less than 2 hours, the two teams sorted 9,000 pounds of food, enough to feed 100 people for 18 days. The success of this service project inspired other teams to follow suit.

When you live alongside the rich marine environment of the Pacific Ocean, it’s only natural to look to the ocean as your teacher. That’s what the Ocean Discovery Institute has done, and Life Technologies supports this nonprofit organization’s programs with funding, in-kind donations of scientific equipment and supplies and the participation of our scientists. The Ocean Discovery Institute runs tuition-free educational programs for 5,000 urban, disadvantaged and minority youths each year, using science, the ocean and nature to inspire and empower them. The mix of classroom-based experimental science, intensive after-school and summer programs, and community-based habitat restoration provides more than 48,000 hours of instruction annually.

Each year, the top 20 to 28 students in the Ocean Discovery Institute are invited to join its Ocean Leaders program. This intensive course includes 11 weeks training and preparation in San Diego, five weeks working on actual research projects at the Vermillion Sea Field Station on Bahía de Los Angeles in Baja California, and three weeks debriefing and presenting their results. The field station is located among 17 nature-rich islands in the Sea of Cortez along Baja’s eastern coast, about 450 miles south of San Diego.

In 2009, Life Technologies sent Associate Scientist Tatiana Cirico from the Genomic Technologies group in Molecular Biology Systems to the Bahía site to introduce the students to DNA, cloning and protein expression. “I wanted to link the talk to the subjects they were studying,” Cirico says, “so I described the fluorescent proteins we use as markers in cell biology and related them to the bioluminescence exhibited by many marine organisms.” For a hands-on experiment, Cirico conducted an experiment in which the students extracted DNA from strawberries using simple household chemicals. “That was exciting for them,” she says. “The solution was even pink!”