Forget baking soda volcanoes and lima beans in paper towels. The fourteen high school students at the recent BIO International Convention in Chicago were more interested in how to differentiate stem cells into pancreatic endoderm, which factors inhibit cell proliferation in glioblastomas, and why an antioxidant has anti-angiogenic effects on epithelial ovarian cancer. "We enjoy it," smiles Raina Jain of Freedom High School in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the first-place winner of this year's linkurl:sanofi-aventis International BioGENEius Challenge,;http://www.biotechinstitute.org/programs/biogeneius_challenge.html which held its final competition at this year's BIO convention at the beginning of May. Get ready MIT and CalTech -- these aren't your average high school students. Jain spent two and a half years working on her research with Matthias Falk, a cell biologist at Lehigh University, after contacting him during her freshman year of high school and asking to him to "give [her] a try" in his lab. For her prize-winning project,...
Interested in reading more?
Become a Member of
Receive full access to more than 35 years of archives, as well as TS Digest, digital editions of The Scientist, feature stories, and much more!
