Challenging Tomorrow’s Scientists
By Patricia Nicholson

Last month, several Canadian scientists were honoured for their work, which ranged from identifying what may be the genetic mutation responsible for a rare blood condition, to studying bioremediation at mine tailing sites.
While these projects had strong scientific merit, their most surprising aspect may be that they were executed by high-school students. The awards recognized the top five national winners of the Aventis Biotech Challenge, a high-level competition that offers high-school students the opportunity to design and pursue their own research projects.
The competition is intended to challenge and encourage students, and to introduce them to the realities of biotechnology by teaming them with a mentor from the scientific community.
The winner of the $5,000 first-place award was Charles Tran, a 17-year-old Grade 12 student from Old Scona Academic High School in Edmonton, Alta. His project, Characterization of the Mutations of the Factor VII Gene, identified a mutation that had not been previously reported, and which may be responsible for a rare condition that prevents blood from clotting.
Tran will represent Canada at the 2004 BioGENEius Student Competition in San Francisco, Calif. on June 6.
The $4,000 award for second place went to 17-year-old William Turk, a Grade 11 student at Grant Park High School in Winnipeg, Man., for a project called Mine Tailings: Studying the Role of Microbial Communities. Turk explored three former gold mining sites to investigate how microscopic life forms break down pollution at mine tailing sites.
Kimberly Richards, 15, a Grade 9 student at Walter Murray Collegiate Institute in Saskatoon, Sask., took home the $3,000 prize for third place for her Choose Them or Lose Them? project, which studied the genetic impact of 150 years of selective wheat breeding.
Fourth place, and $2,000, went to 17-year-old Grade 12 students Natalie MacLeod and Anaies Nazarian for their project Combating Neurodegenerative Disorders: The Role of Tyrosine in the Aggregation of the PrP Cellular Protein.
Andrée-Anne Rouleau, a 17-year-old student at Collège Jean-Eudes in Montreal, Que., won the $1,000 award for fifth place for her project, Un pile de moules, which investigated the possibility of producing usable energy by making a biological battery using the toxic metals that accumulate in sea mussels.
A special sixth award recognizing the project with the greatest commercial potential went to Sara Small and Rowan MacParland from Holy Heart of Mary High School in St. John’s, Nfld. for their Tea-riffic Skin project, which explored skin-cream applications of the anti-oxidants found in green tea.
Fourth-place awardees MacLeod and Nazarian heard the winners announced at Aventis’s Toronto offices, where the greater Toronto finalists brought their projects together for a final look at their accomplishments, followed by the announcement. MacLeod and Nazarian had already captured first prize for the region, which awarded them $2,500 cash plus a $2,500 scholarship to either the University of Toronto (U of T) (Toronto, ON) or York University (Toronto, ON).
“We’re very happy,” Nazarian says of their performance in the competition. “Every single project was amazing.”
The pair participated in the Aventis Biotech Challenge through the Ontario Science Centre Science School (Toronto, ON), which provides an intensive one-semester science program for students who apply from all over Ontario. MacLeod and Nazarian are now back at their “home” school, St. Joseph Morrow Park Catholic High School in Toronto, Ont. Both students will be enrolling in the Life Sciences program at U of T this fall.
Their winning project began when the media focus on mad cow disease led them to begin investigating causes of the disease. Their research on prions led them to create a hypothesis: that the amino acid tyrosine might prevent the formation of the clumps of prions known as amyloid deposits, which impair brain function. Working with mentor Dr. Neil Cashman of the Centre for Research in Neurodegenerative Diseases at U of T, MacLeod and Nazarian were able to design and execute their study.
MacLeod and Nazarian have gone to school together since they were four years old. Each has been participating in science fairs since Grade 8, and they have competed as a team for two years. Despite their experience with science fairs, they say the Aventis Biotech Challenge was a whole new level.
“I think this has an unbelievable amount of scientific merit,” MacLeod says of the opportunities provided by the competition. “We were working with a mentor, one of the top researchers in this field.”
“You get the chance to do experiments in an actual lab,” Nazarian says. “You get to participate in the scientific community.”
The competition gave MacLeod and Nazarian the chance to do hands-on work to answer their own questions.
“We’re very curious people,” Nazarian says.
“That’s what led to this experiment,” MacLeod adds. “The answer wasn’t in literature. We had to find the answer ourselves.”