Fifty years ago, a winning science project for a high school science fair might have been building a rocket in the backyard of your house. All you had at your disposal was whatever you could buy at the local stores. Your lab space was most likely the basement or the garage.
Today, a typical project at the Intel Science Talent Search (sometimes called the junior Nobel Prize) might involve identifying novel drug targets for cancer. Recently, 18-year-old Eric Chen’s project to speed up the discovery of anti-flu medicine won the Google Science Fair, Siemens Competition and the Intel Science Talent Search. It has become the norm for kids as young as 14 to start working in professional research labs. Can you believe that? The days of rockets in the backyard are over. Kids are now finding potential cures to diseases that wreak havoc on individuals, families and society when they just barely started high school.
How the heck did we get from building backyard rockets to curing neurodegenerative diseases?
As a long time veteran of high school science fairs, I was exposed to this world of young high school scientists. At the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, about a thousand of us were squeezed inside this huge convention room. Separated by iron chains, we each occupied our own territory with a poster of our science project to present to the judges.
Actually, you could barely call these posters a “poster.” Many of the displays were three times my height, or even two times the size of a normal door. One of the projects next to mine didn’t even have a poster. It was more like a billboard for a fast food restaurant that you might see while driving on the highway, except that instead of a McDonald’s burger, it was a science project about Alzheimer’s disease (I later found out the kid’s parents paid $3,000 to an advertising company to make the billboard. Go figure!) I have presented at several professional conferences, and the billboards at the Intel Fair make the posters made by adult, professional scientists look like child’s play.
A loud beep signaled the start of judging. All chatting ceased, and everybody straightened up, prepared for the onslaught. We each had 15 minutes to present our work to a judge, and there were about five judges in total. In the boisterous room that probably had the noise level of a busy street in Saigon, we were all sweating, shaking and mentally rehearsing our spiel. When the judges came to the project, we shook their hands and began to present our “sales pitches.” “My work,” pitched one student, “will ultimately lead to a paradigm shift within the field of neural regenerative medicine by revealing novel pathways in axonal growth and neurogenesis.” He later went on to win second place in the competition.
The most impressive sales pitch of that day, however, belonged to high school freshman Jack Andraka. He claimed to have invented a way to diagnose pancreatic cancer that was 168 times faster, 1/26,667th as expensive and 400 times more sensitive than current methods. His project went on to win the entire competition. I still remember seeing how he ran up to the stage as his name was called. Everybody was screaming and yelling, with confetti flying up everywhere and blinding camera flashes. Jack Andraka became more famous than a movie star. He went on pretty much every news network and gave interviews. Two years after he won the fair, the news was still talking about him, championing him as the 14-year-old who pushed the boundaries of human knowledge towards a cure for cancer.
Of course, all of this media attention is fun and exciting. However, if Andraka’s method really was 400 times faster than conventional tools, why are we not using it in the clinic? If it really was that revolutionary, where is the published paper of the method, subjected to rigorous peer-review from professional scientists? According to a Forbes article titled, “Why Biotech Whiz Kid Jack Andraka Is Not On The Forbes 30 Under 30 List,” when a manuscript of Andraka’s work was reviewed anonymously by five leading scientists in the field, most of the scientists found that Andraka’s results or claims were just simply not true.
And that’s where we need to take a break from all of that limelight and really evaluate the culture of science fairs. There is absolutely nothing wrong with students as young as 14 years old working in the lab. In fact, I basically grew up in the lab, and my early exposure to a professional scientific research environment was instrumental in clarifying my interests in the scientific field. There is also nothing wrong about presenting work at science fairs. However, what is damaging to science is that these science fairs put too much focus on the sensationalism of science. Students are now more concerned with how flashy or fancy their project can be, so that they can win over the judges in the short 15-minute interview, rather than trying to understand the underlying scientific process. By rewarding sensationalism, science fairs are nurturing shallow thinkers who act more like businessmen than scientists, and this attitude is harmful in our endeavor to develop the next generation of scientists.
