This article reviews a selection of undergraduate programs intended to increase successful minority participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics majors, potentially leading to biomedical careers. The object is to examine their structure, consider how well they address the issues of the target population, and assess the extent to which they have met/meet their goals. As a means of conducting this review, the first step is to examine the concepts used as the building blocks for program design. These concepts are found in a shared, yet often undefined, vocabulary used in most undergraduate programs for minority students. The hypothesis is that a shared vocabulary obscures a broad range of meaning and interpretation that has serious ramifications affecting student success. How these building blocks are understood and implemented strongly reflects the institution where the program is housed. The discussion further considers the nature of a number of programs created by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health specifically for underrepresented minority students and examines one program in detail, the University of California Berkeley's National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates Program in Molecular, Cell, and Evolutionary Biology. The characteristics of federally organized programs and the Research Experience for Undergraduates are contrasted with 2 very successful student-centered local programs based on a different conceptual model.

made the now much-quoted observation that in every arena in which women are active, they need not just fair treatment and equal opportunity but power. In this special issue on Women and Science, we take power to mean not just power over their own lives (control), but power over the institutions and the policies that govern their work. Alice Huang (2001), biologist, member of the National Science Board, and faculty member at California Institute of Technology, carries this insight over to women in science. She advocates informed and self-conscious pursuit of one's career as a way of accessing power. And once in power, quoting the late Polly Bunting (a biologist from an earlier generation), women must work on behalf of other women.Implied in Albright's and Huang's commentary is that power ought to be sought to "move the mountain," to change existing institutions and arrangements such that women will succeed and gain equivalency in position, recognition, and pay. But not all women scientists, even those who would demand equivalency, are committed to achieving power. This issue of the Bulletin was inspired by a 2000 conference on "Women in Science: Gender and Power," where the organizers were surprised to find that few of the papers addressed power per se. Instead, they found the notion of power on the part of our respondents to be problematic. For example, two articles were submitted examining women's attitudes toward power, one on the British Civil Service by an Englishwoman, Patricia Ellis, and the other by an Italian, Giavanna Gabetta.From these reports, it would appear that what female scientists care most about (or are most willing to acknowledge) is not their ability to reshape the wider world but to control their immediate environment and have access to the resources they need for

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