Sam Rhine, who holds a PhD in medical genetics, gave a presentation to regional AP Biology (Bio) students in the auditorium on Dec. 1. The AP Bio field trip took the students out for the whole day while they listened to a three hour presentation on the science of cancer and Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR.

Each year, Rhine visits with a new presentation for the AP Bio students. He began this tradition in 1994, making this is his twenty-third year traveling to Oakwood.

“The 93-94 school year my wife, son, daughter, and I left Indiana and went to Russia for a year. We taught in schools in St. Petersburg. When we came back I didn’t have a job. I had been doing some of these programs before [traveling to St. Petersburg]. So, on a wing and a prayer we started setting them up and people started coming. All of a sudden I had a job and I could pay my mortgage,” Rhine said.

His job entails traveling and speaking to students throughout the midwest, and occasionally on the east coast.

“It’s a fun job because you see outstanding students from around the nation every day. It’s a terrible job because you have to travel,”  Rhine said. “I finished yesterday in Aurora, Ohio, right by Cleveland. I had to drive four and half hours to get here, and now I have to drive home.”

Rhine has reached the age of seventy, but continues to speak because of the effect he has on those who listen to his presentations.

I don’t mention it, but we changed some of the lives in the audience forever. Three and half hours with somebody you don’t even know and your life can be changed forever,” Rhine said. “ That’s what I say at the start, ‘you guys can do stuff like this, you’re the ones who can pull it off.’”

By: Quinn Murray

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