RSS 2.0 FeedThursday, January 19, 2012, Cover Stories, Bellmore Life
CHSD notches new Intel semifinal winners
CHSD announces five outstanding science students.
TOMORROW’S LEADERS are, from left, Ross Shulman, Ross Iscowitz and Brett Gossett, Kennedy High School. Bellmore Life photos by Andrew Ryan
The Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District continued its winning ways with the announcement that five students from its three high schools had been named semifinalists in the Intel Science Talent Search contest.
The students, Asia Brown from Calhoun High School; Brett Gossett, Ross Iscowitz and Ross Shulman from Kennedy; and Bilal Siddiqui from Mepham; are involved in the district’s Advanced Science Research program begun in 2001 under the auspices of then-Superintendent Thomas Caramore.
Kennedy High School
Can mice make decisions using sound?
Ross Iscowitz worked on the behaviorial analysis of auditory decision-making in mice that may one day help scientists unravel the mysteries of autism in humans.
In January 2011 Ross began preparing for his work at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory by reading scientific journals such as the American Journal of Neurology. “I’ve always been interested in neurology,” he told this newspaper, and was eager to do research to learn if cell phones play a role in the growth of brain tumors.
But, “I couldn’t find any mentors” because of controversy over the subject, such as private studies being conducted even as the government continues to state the safety of cell phones.
Instead, he shifted his topic in order to move forward: Could mice decide what to do based on sounds they heard? Because there are mice with autism, he wanted a control group to compare to the mice with autism as a means of better understanding the mice with autism.
The laboratory work, conducted in the summer of 2011 under the guidance of Dr. Anne Churchland, a neuroscientist, began by creating a box with nose pokes – center, right and left holes that a mouse puts its nose in.
Once the mouse understood to put its nose in the center hole, it was subjected to noise from either the right or left and had to decide which way to go for its reward: the right or left.
“Over time, there was a dramatic increase in the proportion of proper decisions,” said Ross.
The study involved not only the noise factor (the beep, beep, beeps) but a duration of time – or waiting – about whether to go to the right or left. The longer a mouse waited, the more was inferred the mouse was waiting longer intervals to get more information as to what precisely to do.
The conclusion, or at least assumption that could be drawn, is that mice are somewhat intelligent problem-solvers.
“Mice are a species in which genetic tools are available,” Ross said. Because there are “models of mice with autism,” he said information provided to scientists from this study could help them compare the brains of autistic mice with these control- group mice to further understand the mechanisms of autism in mice – and ultimately, humans.
Ross will attend the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall.
Detecting the residue of bias
Brett Gossett worked on a testing method that may one day help teachers to develop more accurate testing to eliminate any residue of bias toward children with disabilities.
Begining his research in the summer of 2010 at the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Hospital System’s Cohen’s Children’s Hospital, he worked with Drs. Andrew Adesman and Ruth Milanaik to develop specialized essays.
His goal: to determine if there is bias in teachers toward children with disabilities, especially those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
In developing the essays, “I had to find a way to compare children with disabilities to those without,” Brett told this newspaper. According to Barbara Franklin, an ASR teacher, Brett “created fake essay compositions” in which he described himself as a child with ADHD, as a child with cerebral palsy or a child with diabetes. “Diabetes acted as the control [neutral] group,” said Brett.
The essay was: As a kid with an affliction, how do you handle that affliction?
The essay was mailed to 5,184 middle school English teachers around the country. “It took me a week to put stamps on them all, working all day,” Ross laughed.
Included in the packets of essays – in which a teacher got only one of the three essays – was a grade rubric, or standards to follow, such has rating punctuation from 1-6, rating grammer from 1-6, and so on. The essays were pre-tested using the Fleisch-Kincade Readability level for grade 7 level readability.
Brett received 557 responses, immediately applying a statistical analysis to ratings he got back. While he was prepared to prove a negative bias toward children with ADHD, what the numbers showed, once crunched, was a positive bias in favor of those children with cerebral palsy! “I expected ADHD students to grade lower,” he said.
While he hopes to get his finding published, Barbara Frank (an ASR teacher) added that his research will provide still another tool in teachers’ growing arsenal of tools to help them eliminate any bias toward students when evaluating them.
Brett plans to study psychology at Brandeis University.
Can CO2 stave off drought?
Ross Shulman’s study of soy bean leaves under drought-stricken conditions while applying carbon dioxide may help scientists work toward building more sturdy crops in the growing face of a fast-changing atmospheric environment.
Beginning his research and lab work in the summer of 2010, and working through the year into the summer of 2011 at Brookhaven National Laboratory with Dr. Alistair Rogers – who mentored 2010’s Intel Semifinalist Daniel Bornstein – Ross requested soya bean samples to be grown for his lab work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s SOYFACE (Free Air Concentration Enrichment) facility.
Ross knew that in drought conditions, the depletion of nitrogen in the soil leads to a lack of nitrates (nutrition) in the plant for sustenance, because without the nitrogen the plant cannot convert it to nitrates.
The study was to discover if increased levels of carbon dioxide even in a plant stricken with drought – and depleted of nitrogen – could increase the nitrogen content in the soil to increase conversion to nitrates and better nutritional stability.
“I hoped that increased levels of carbon dioxide would decrease the impact of drought by increasing the soil moisture content,” he said.
Once he received the samples from the SOYFACE facility, however, he was surprised to learn when analyzing drought-stricken leaves that carbon dioxide increases did not in fact increase nitrogen content in the leaves.
“I found just the opposite to be true. I found that the more elevated levels of carbon dioxide the fewer levels of nitrogen were available.” Carbon dioxide, he said, made the impact of drought even worse.
Continued decreases on the amount of nitrogen in plants would lead to a decrease in the quality of plants used for feeding the world’s population while it reduces the yields of those crops.
With the level of carbon dioxide now at 378 parts per milliom (ppm) in the atmosphere and expected to grow to 585 ppm by the year 2050, he said work would need to be taken by scientists to find ways to create more sturdy crops to stave off an impending drought from rising carbon dioxide levels.
Although undecided as to what school he will attend, he intends to study the chemical, physical or environmental sciences to become an educator and researcher.
Bilal Siddiqui
Mepham High School
Immunological cells denied food
Bilal Siddiqui actually began his project, “Investigating Endogenous Expressions of Indoleomine 2,3 Dioxygenase in Metastatic Melinomas,” in summer 2010 at Memorial Sloane Kettering in New York City, and continued it throughout the school year into summer 2011, under the mentorship of Dr. Taha Merghoub.
“When my cousin became ill with leukemia in winter 2009 I knew what I wanted to study in my ASR class. With the help of Dr. David Kommer [Advanced Science Research teacher] I tried contacting Dr. Merghoub. Until the summer of 2010 I read all his papers,” Bilal told this newspaper at his home.
Once he got into the lab, “I had no idea what was going on,” he said. “I hadn’t taken an AP biology class so I had no idea about lab protocol or how experiments were conducted.”
He looked at others’ experiments to get ideas, and also read a Georgia Tech study involving the enzyme IDO (indoleomine 2,3 dioxygenase) as a mechanism in cancer that suppresses immunology.
Finally settling in at the lab, he was provided with slides of melanoma cells from various parts of the body where the cancer had metastasized and, with a microscope, injected antibodies into those cells to target IDO.
“The cancer cells picked up those antibodies and glowed brown,” he said. The IDO was expressing itself, he said, by glowing, up-regulating. It was producing IDO.
The correlation of the up-regulation, or the down-regulation, was that T-cell activity responsible for immune responses was decreasing. “The cancer cells continued to produce IDO, which was then suppressing the T-cells,” he said.
Specifically, the up-regulation of IDO showed that it was producing so rapidly that it was breaking down trypophan too quickly to be aborbed by T-cells. With trypophan an essential nutrient for T-cell activity and sustenance, IDO was denying the cells nutrition. T-cells could then not perform their immunological functions properly.
The study proved that the up-regulation of IDO was suppressing T-cell functions vital to anti-cancer activity. He said over 2,000 samples were analyzed in just one month alone in developing the conclusion.
Bilal suggested that the study could be applied to liver cancer and other cancers in the future.
Meanwhile, depending upon which school accepts him for fall studies – Yale, Columbia, UPenn, Brown or Cornell – to study biochemistry and perhaps lead to a career in immunotherapy – Bilal will work again at MSK this summer with the express purpose of finding inhibitors that could block production of IDO.
Asia Brown
Calhoun High School
Focusing on genetic expressions
Calhoun High School’s Asia Brown’s paper, titled “Analysis of Altered Gene Expression in Human Colon Cancer Cells Exposed to the Methylation Inhibitor 5-aza-z’deoxycitidine,” was inspired in large measure by her Advanced Placement biology teacher Kim Lascarides, who is also a teacher in Calhoun’s Advanced Science Research program.
Other teachers at Calhoun’s ASR program include Nick Pappas and Jennifer Profaci. Mr. Pappas characterized Asia as being wholly passionate in her love of science and research.
“I began preparing for a subject for my ASR class in February 2011 and had Mrs. Lascarides as my biology teacher,” Asia told this newspaper during an interview at her home. “She noticed I had an interest in oncology so encouraged me to read Dr. Ellen Li’s papers on the subject.” Dr. Li is a cancer researcher at Stony Brook University’s Medical Center.
Mrs. Lascarides also helped Asia to become part of Simon’s Summer Fellowship Program, involving 33 students who would study at the medical center in the summer of 2011. The subject: Epigenetics, or how DNA interacts to methylation inhibitors to create different genetic expressions in colon cancer cells. Her mentor: Dr. Li.
The human body methylates itself naturally, but Asia became interested in what happens to colon cancer genes when they are exposed to the methylation inhibition process using deoxycitidine as the prevailing agent. “I wanted to see what genes are affected by the methylation inhibitor,” she said.
“In cancer cells there is either too much or too little methylation going on, and I wanted to identify those genes that were reacting,” she told this newspaper.
Provided with trays of colon cancer cells by the medical center’s genomics core, she was looking particularly at the florescence given off by the methylation inhibition process to witness what genes were expressing what, or how they were behaving and reacting to the inhibitor.
A high amount of florescence (stain) is called up-regulating, and low florescence is called down-regulating. During up-regulation she found that immunological genes were very active and were increasing apoptosis, or cell death. Conversely, in down-regulation she found that genes responsible for cell division growth slowed cell growth down. “Up-regulation works with down regulation to stabilize cell growth,” she said.
Much of her work involved analyzing raw data on spreadsheets that were 55,000 rows long and 14-16 columns wide to arrive at her identifications. “I actually ran two computer programs and did vast literature searches,” she said.
With her work on these first variables now shared with the scientific community, Asia has her sites set on studying molecular and cellular biology at Yale (hopefully), leading to a career in pharmacological oncology.
