Girls sweep first Google Science Fair, with eldest winning $50,000
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0643
Google recently processed more than 7500 Web-submitted science fair entries from more than 10 000 students in 91 countries, and selected 15 finalists who assembled in Silicon Valley earlier this month for final judging. Girls won in all three age categories.
As Fox News reported at the time:
In the 13-to-14 age group, Lauren Hodge won for her project studying varying carcinogen levels in grilled chicken — depending on sauce type. In the 15-to-16 age range, Naomi Shah tried to prove that tweaking the environment indoors can improve air quality and lessen people’s reliance on asthma medication. The Grand Prize winner (and winner in the 17-to-18 age group) was Shree Bose, who found a way to improve ovarian cancer treatment for patients when they have built up a resistance to certain chemotherapy drugs.
Now the New York Times‘s Kenneth Chang, writing in the “Science Times” section, has given the story prominent coverage at the top of an inside page, complete with a
of the three smiling, trophy-holding winners.
Chang’s opening seems worth quoting:
As a budding inventor and scientist, Shree Bose, in second grade, tried to make blue spinach. In fourth grade she built a remote-controlled garbage can. In eighth grade she invented a railroad tie made out of recycled plastic and granite dust, an achievement that got her to the top 30 in a national science competition for middle school students.
In 11th grade Ms. Bose, a 17-year-old in Fort Worth, tackled ovarian cancer, and that research won her the grand prize and $50,000 in the Google Science Fair last week.
For the winning research Ms. Bose looked at a chemotherapy drug, cisplatin, that is commonly taken by women with ovarian cancer. The problem is that the cancer cells tend to grow resistant to cisplatin over time, and Ms. Bose set out to find a way to counteract that.
She found the answer in a cellular energy protein known as AMPK, or adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase. She observed that when AMPK was paired with cisplatin at the beginning of treatment the combination diminished the effectiveness of cisplatin. But added later on, when the cancer cells were growing resistant, the AMPK worked to maintain the effectiveness of cisplatin, allowing it to continue killing the malignant cells, at least in cell cultures.
Besides the $50 000 scholarship, Bose won science trips to the Galápagos Islands and to CERN, the European particle-accelerator laboratory.
Nine of the 15 finalists were boys. Chang calls the sweep by girls “a contrast to generations past when women were largely excluded from the science world.”
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for ‘Science and the media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
