Teaching laboratory science in a high school setting has never been easy. Time is available in short blocks; laboratory facilities are often quite limited. In most American high schools, teachers are responsible not only for preparation of their lesson plans, but also for ordering and preparing any materials to be used in a lab, with little or no technical support. Nonetheless, there is an expectation that science instruction will be inquiry-based, giving students opportunities to carry out their own investigations of the natural world. In biology, the challenge is compounded by the fact that the field is changing rapidly, with new information, experimental approaches, and social issues arising at an increasing rate. With these concerns in mind, a group of Washington University (WU) faculty invited the science teachers at a local high school, University City, to meet in 1989 to explore ways that they could work together to find ways that the strengths of the university could be used to support local high schools. The brainstorming sessions concerning biology became focused with the opportunity to apply for a Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). A particular concern of the teachers was to find ways to incorporate DNA science into their curriculum while maintaining a grounding in genetics, but adding hands-on experiments that would help students to understand the science underlying developments such as personal identification through DNA samples, the sequencing of the human genome, and other recent advances with societal implications. This partnership between high school and university is discussed within this article.