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Saturday, Jul. 11, 2009

High school students doing cancer research and more this summer

MILLEDGEVILLE — For one group of teens, summer vacation has meant more than kicking back or lazy days at the pool.

“I’m working with scientists doing research,” said Candace Jordan, 16, a rising junior at Washington County High School. She was wearing goggles and hovering over chemicals and beakers in a lab at Georgia College & State University.

The aspiring pediatrician is using gadolinium, one of the rare-earth elements, to create something that could one day be used to detect abnormalities in a patient’s magnetic resonance imaging scan.

Jordan is one of four students working in the university’s high school research program doing cancer and other wound-healing research under the watchful eye of a professor. And they’re getting paid for it.

DeAndre’ Beck, 18, who just graduated as valedictorian from Twiggs County High School, is doing work with another chemical element, fluorine, for cancer research.

“When I graduate from college, I want to work for the (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), so this type of research will really benefit me and the work I’m doing in the future,” said Beck, who is headed to Georgia College this fall.

The university has had a high school research program since 2002, with at least 11 high school students participating, said Rosalie Richards, a professor of chemistry.

It aims to get more low-income students, and high school students in general, interested in pursuing college degrees in chemistry or other science-related fields.

“This is graduate level research that they’re doing,” Richards said. “In central Georgia, where access to science and resources are limited, it’s good that these students get a taste of what scientists do every day.”

The students have to show interest in science, get a teacher’s recommendation and write an essay to shoot for one of the competitive slots.

“And we get paid,” which is another perk, said 14-year-old participant Geovic Jadol, a Georgia Military College high school sophomore working with lithium, which he says can help with research on manic depression.

A grant from the American Chemical Society and money raised by Georgia College’s Science Education Center pays the students stipends for their work. Some beginners to the program earn $300 a week, and more advanced students can earn up to $3,300 for the summer.

Richards has been studying porphyrin chemistry since 1990, when she got turned on to the subject while getting her doctorate in chemistry from the University of Southern California. Porphyrins, she explained, are the colors of life, such as in hemoglobin and the molecules in plants, helping make them red or green, for example.

Porphyrin research can be used in a hotly studied area of cancer therapy known as photodynamic therapy. For it to work, Richards said, a chemical is injected into a cancer patient. It’s drawn to a tumor site in the body and, when activated by light from radiation in the presence of oxygen, it can destroy the tumor.

The high school students write in journals about all of their “unprecedented” work using the different chemicals. The university is scheduled to publish their findings, she said.

“It’s a slow, very deliberate process,” Richards said of the research. “In years of pursing this, you get maybe an inch closer, but at least we’re going in the right direction.”

To contact writer Julie Hubbard, call 744-4331.