Laboring in the lab. Photo: Les Todd

"It was morning to night," Jensen says. "There was no chance to get bored. I was calling it 'Bio Boot Camp.' "

He wasn't the only one. Even experienced biotech professionals sometimes find the sheer volume of information and brisk pace a bit overwhelming. "It's very intense," says Neal Lambert, associate director of marketing, Asia-Pacific region, for Amgen. "Come in and be prepared to be a sponge."

In fact, participants who think they might get to enjoy a leisurely tour of the flowering Duke campus, a round or two of golf, or maybe just a short nap, usually find their hopes dashed. Instead, like other overworked graduate students, they troop from lecture to lab to discussion, with breaks mainly for coffee or food. The big difference is, these Duke graduate students get to eat sumptuous meals and stay at the luxurious Washington Duke Inn.

The fourth and last full day of the course, which focuses on stem cells, pharmacology, and trauma and infection, is particularly demanding. By this time, several are shaking their heads wearily, only half-joking when they complain that they have no more room in their brains for any more information. "Overall, it stretched me and almost broke me," quips Bill Schultz, the head of an executive search firm in Madison, Wisconsin. "All my friends say, 'You did what?' "

Schultz, a self-styled "business administrative guy" never attracted to the life sciences before, went to college before the first recombinant DNA molecule was discovered in 1973. But now, after many years in the computer software business, he's turning to biotech because he sees the same promise there that he once saw in the software field.

Many participants see the same promise. Intense and highly motivated to get their money's worth in a short time, they often give as good they get. In a horseshoe-shaped classroom at the Sanford Institute one morning last May, students peppered instructor Theresa O'Halloran with questions about DNA structure, interrupted her with comments, and corrected her when she occasionally tripped up on amino-acid names and terms. "Just checking," she said, smiling, when caught once.

The classroom exchanges also provide some lighter moments as students and instructors occasionally banter over the course material. In one session last May, program participants cracked up as Lin, the cell-biology professor, explained that the genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees is only about 1 percent, or just ten times the 0.1 percent difference between two people. "There are funny arguments one could make about this," he said, his eyes twinkling. "If there are twenty people on line and there is a 0.1 percent difference between them, the first and last ones we could call chimpanzees."

The reasons that participants come to the Duke biotechnology program are wide ranging. As might be expected, many, like Peter Jensen from Merck, come to advance their careers and strengthen their companies by boosting their knowledge of core biotech concepts. Whether they have science backgrounds or not, they seek to beef up their scientific and technical expertise so they can earn promotions, swing deals, purchase materials, market products, recruit customers, and generally make more money for their firms.

"It's going to be helpful in dealing with my clients--senior executives at pharmaceutical and biotech companies," says Joe Melvin, a senior engagement manager at Strategic Decisions Group, a management-consulting firm in Menlo Park, California. "This'll give me a credibility edge. I'll be able to ask more intelligent questions and understand their problems."

Career advancement and company enhancement are not the whole story, though. Some participants hunger to enter the burgeoning life-sciences industry, with its huge potential for growth and profits. Convinced that biotech will be to the economy in the twenty-first century what information technology was at the end of the twentieth, they aim to hitch a ride, even if they haven't cracked open a biology textbook or lit a Bunsen burner since high school.