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WASHINGTON - Research that may lead to a
better understanding of how diseases like mad cow destroy the brain and how
the West Nile Virus spreads were among discoveries by high school students
honored at a national science contest this week.
Yin Li, a 17-year-old
senior from New York City's Stuyvesant High School, won $100,000 in
scholarship money for studying how a protein from a mouse's brain reproduced
itself when inserted in yeast cells, advancing the understanding of
neurological diseases like bovine spongiform encephalopathy, known as mad cow
disease, or its human equivalent Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Li was among 19
high school students from around the nation who received prizes in the
Siemens Westinghouse annual competition out of more than 1,000 who entered. "There is a plan behind everything. It's
just extraordinary to get a glimpse of what that is," said Li who volunteered to work on
the project in the laboratory of Nobel Prize-winner Eric Kandel after being
inspired by his study on brain cells, memory and learning.
Science is considered
an extremely noble profession in countries like China, India, and the former
Soviet Union, said Albert Hoser, chairman and CEO of Siemens Foundation.
"I'm afraid this is not so in this country."
Mark Schneider, 18,
and his brother Jeffrey Schneider, 16, will share $100,000 as winners of the
team category for advancing ways to understand the spread of West Nile. They were inspired to look at mosquitoes because the
youngest of the brothers from South Windsor High School in Connecticut was
especially susceptible to being bitten. They looked at the factors affecting
the transmission and reproduction of the West Nile Virus using a computer
program.
One of their main
findings is that drought actually helps proliferate the virus, said Mark
Schneider. His theory is that under drought conditions mosquitoes and their
predators live in separate water pools. The predators are therefore less
likely to eat the mosquitoes and keep the population under control.
Other prize winners
included Arun Thottumkara, a 17-year-old senior from Macomb, Illinois, who
was inspired by
the bad smell in his father's laboratory to find ways of producing
environment-friendly chemical compounds.
Sean Mehra and
Jeffrey Reitman, 17-year-olds from Jericho, New York, were recognized for
work with molecules that can be used as lubricants in space-based machinery
or in making computer chips.
"We are
trying to showcase young people who go into math, science and technology
because this is what will drive the struggles, which will keep this country
competitive and which will advance the lives and improve the lives of
humankind on this planet," said Hoser of the Siemens Foundation.
Story by Cyrille
Cartier, Story Date:
10/12/2003 @ http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/23064/story.htm
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