'Biotech boot camp' drills in the basics. (Institute for Science Training and Research Inc.)

ISTR explains it all for neophytes who don't know an allele from a zygote

From alleles to zygotes, the vocabulary of genetics is a mystery to most non-scientists. Add in the tools that biotechnology uses to manipulate life's genetic building blocks - cosmids and plasmids, taq polymerase and gel electrophoresis - and you have a bewildering new language that badly needs translation.

It turns out that just down the hall from every corporate biotech research lab, there are chief financial officers or computer specialists who have few clues about their colleagues' mumbo-jumbo. Outsiders dealing with the burgeoning industry - be they CPAs, salespeople or software designers - often face the same knowledge gap.

Spotting this need, a trio of young scientists from the University of Washington's highly regarded Department of Molecular …