|
The New York Times
n.y./region
Girls Make History by
Sweeping Top Honors
at a Science Contest
By AMANDA MILLNER-FAIRBANKS,
From the nytimes.com on the Web, December 4, 2007
Girls won top honors for the first
time in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, one of the
nation’s most coveted student science awards, which were announced yesterday at
New York University.
Janelle Schlossberger and Amanda Marinoff, both 17 and seniors at Plainview-Old
Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School on Long Island, split the first prize — a
$100,000 scholarship — in the team category for creating a molecule that helps
block the reproduction of drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria.
Isha Himani Jain, 16, a senior at Freedom High School in Bethlehem, Pa., placed
first in the individual category for her studies of bone growth in zebra fish,
whose tail fins grow in spurts, similar to the way children’s bones do.
She will get a $100,000 scholarship.
The three girls’ victories is “wonderful news, but I can’t honestly say it’s
shocking,” said Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
Dr. Hopkins helped start a national discussion about girls and science two years
ago when she walked out of a talk by Harvard University’s president, Lawrence H.
Summers, after he suggested that innate differences between men and women might
be one reason that fewer women than men succeed in math and science careers.
Dr. Summers apologized during the ensuing furor; he announced his resignation as
Harvard’s president 13 months later.
“Why do people think girls can’t do science?” Dr. Hopkins said yesterday.
“Where did this crazy idea ever come from?”
James Whaley, president of the Siemens Foundation, which oversees the
competition for Siemens AG, a global electronics and engineering company, said
the competition results send a great message to young women.
Alicia Darnell, 17, a senior at Pelham Memorial High School in Pelham, N.Y., won
second place and a $50,000 scholarship in the individual category for research
that identified genetic defects that could play a role in the development of Lou
Gehrig’s disease.
The Siemens competition was first held in 1998 and is distinct from the
Westinghouse Science Talent Search, which was founded in 1941 and is now known
as the Intel Science Talent Search. Many high school students enter both.
This year, more than 1,600 students nationwide entered the Siemens competition.
After several rounds of judging, 20 finalists were chosen to present their
projects at N.Y.U. and to vie for scholarships ranging from $10,000 to $100,000.
Eleven of the finalists were girls. It was the first year that girls
outnumbered boys in the final round. Most of the finalists attend public
school.
On Sunday, the students gave 12-minute presentations of their projects, filled
with explanations about Herceptin resistance (when breast cancer patients with
HER2-positive tumors do not respond to the drug Herceptin) and FtsZ inhibitors
(experiments on a specific protein that could lead to a new treatment for
drug-resistant tuberculosis).
One of the most popular was by three home-schooled girls from Pennsylvania and
New Jersey — Caroline Lang, 16; Rebecca Ehrhardt, 15; and Naomi Collipp, 16 —
who used a Power Point presentation to demonstrate their “Burgercam” monitoring
system. It is designed to determine when E. coli bacteria in hamburgers
have been safely eliminated by measuring the shrinkage of each patty when fully
cooked.
Several hundreds of hamburgers later, the girls took home fifth place and
$20,000 in scholarship money.
Caroline, Rebecca and Naomi, called “the Hamburger Girls,” said they had been
friends since they were toddlers and had stayed in touch through a group for
home-schooled children.
“They were concerned it wasn’t sophisticated enough, but they wanted to try,”
said Rebecca’s mother, Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt, a plasma physicist.
Three-quarters of the finalists have a parent who is a scientist. The
parents of Alicia Darnell, who won second place, are medical researchers at
Rockefeller University, and her maternal grandparents were scientists, too. Isha
Himani Jain, who took home the top individual prize, published her first
research paper with her father, a professor at Lehigh University, when she was
10 or 11; her mother is a doctor.
The Siemens Foundation arranged some sightseeing for the finalists — an outing
to “The Lion King,” bowling at Chelsea Piers and a group picture on the
JumboTron in Times Square.
“It was the most fun I’ve ever had,” said Alexander C. Huang, 17, a senior at
Plano Senior High School in Plano, Tex., who earned a $10,000 scholarship for
research on combating jet lag.
He said he enjoyed the opportunity to be surrounded by like-minded students.
“The kid next to me was cracking math jokes,” Alexander said of the bus tour
during his first night in New York. “They’re even a little bit nerdier
than me.”
|
