Perpetuating a love of learning--and the scientists of tomorrow.
Andy Wang recruited 15 human guinea pigs and asked each to memorize five Chinese characters while the electrodes he’d attached to their heads charted their brain waves.
By measuring recordings from the occipital region and the scores of the memorization test, he figures to begin exploring, as he puts it, “the vast domain of these three pounds of universe, the brain.”
Holly Han worked on figuring out the chemical structure of lipofuscin pigment. “Since lipofuscin pigment is found in cells that are deteriorating, it could be related to cancer or aging factors such as wrinkling and baldness,” she says.
“If I can someday develop a drug or chemical, inject it into a cell, clip off the lipids and shrink the size of the molecule and the body can wash it off. . . .”
Andy, 16, is a junior at Alhambra High School; Holly, 17, is a senior. Their projects were two of the entries at the Alhambra Science and Engineering Expo last week.
If they become research scientists, their careers could easily stretch beyond the middle of the mid-21st Century. And by then, creating a computer whose thinking can grow and progress just as a baby’s does, or a cure for cancer, or a fountain of youth, might seem as ordinary as pocket calculators and jet travel do today.
Andy and Holly are among 80 students in the biomedical research class at Alhambra High School. They arrive at 7 a.m. three days a week to take part in the special program, led by Duane Nichols, chairman of Alhambra’s science department.
“In these four years,” Nichols says, “we try to get them to do a lot of reading, some assigned, some of their own choosing . . . and research projects and research papers. They have to read and write and speak science. Oral presentations are a big part of the class. We find that when they have to teach something, then they know it better.”
Nichols has been teaching and advising the special program for 10 years, and he sees it as a way to motivate students already interested in the sciences, as well as to interest some who may not be sure.
“One of my top seniors came in really unsure whether she liked science or not, really thought she hated it,” Nichols says. That was Holly.
Now, listen as she smoothly discourses about how malondialdehyde reacts with phospholipid phosphatidylethanolamine in her project, “Synthesis, Isolation and Characterization of a Water-Soluble Fluorescent Product Related to Lipofuscin Pigment.”
Holly and David Le, another 17-year-old senior, were named Thursday as the top winners at the science fair. Thanks to a grant from the Alhambra Foundry, they will travel to the International Science and Engineering Fair in Tulsa in May.
David’s project, “Isolation of the Gene Encoding for the Neuropeptide Urotensin I and II from the Goby,” consists of research on proteins from the saltwater fish that ultimately could aid human gene research.
The judges were enthusiastic about the students’ work. Larry Lim of the USC School of Engineering, a veteran high school science fair judge, called the Alhambra show “by far the best quality” of those he’s seen.
“This is a better quality of experiments than some of the ones that have been at the county or state fairs,” said Al Klascius of Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Some judges, though, lamented that most of the students seemed to want to be medical doctors rather than researchers, though they understood why. “There aren’t many examples for a student to know what the life of a scientist is like,” said John Petruska of the USC molecular biology department. “All of them know what the life of a doctor is like. You don’t see a TV series about molecular biologist.”
One judge, Tinky Lai, is an alumna of the biomedical research class. A 1986 Alhambra graduate, she’s now a developmental psychology major at UCLA. “The competition is much more intense than when I was here,” she says. “They’re getting so much more sophisticated. The freshmen might be doing what we would do as juniors.”
Alhambra students, Nichols says proudly, have always excelled in science and math. In fact, Alhambra has had more winners in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search than any other California high school.
But the California overall numbers are still far below those of eastern states like New York, Pennsylvania and Florida. So the state Education Department has allocated $30,000 to be parceled out in $500 grants to teachers who encourage students to participate in the prestigious national Westinghouse contest. As president of the California Biology Educators Assn., Nichols is in charge of disbursing that money to teachers statewide.
A Santa Monica native and graduate of Brigham Young University, Nichols has been at Alhambra High ever since he began teaching in 1968. His own love of science, and his inspiration to become a teacher came, he says, because “I loved what I learned from Mr. Brownsberger and Mr. Stark in science class at Santa Monica High School.
“They made science fun and I just loved the things that we learned. We learned so much and had so much fun doing it.”
To hear his students tell it, Nichols is perpetuating that love of learning. Sophomore Paul Habib, 15, says he hadn’t really thought about taking on such a heavy scientific load until a recruiter at his grade school talked up the biomedical research program at Alhambra.
He applied, was accepted, and for this year’s project charted the reaction of male and female cockatiels to recorded sounds from other cockatiels and from different birds.
Paul gets to school at 7 a.m. three days a week for the sessions. “At first,” he says, “it was really boring and I was thinking of quitting. We did book reports and that was boring. But then the experiments were fun.”
Now in his second year, it’s still hard to wake up those early mornings. “You want to sleep,” he says, “but you know you better get there or you miss information.” Paul says he always planned to be a dentist, “but you never know. I might be testing birds.”
