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Science News, March 18, 1995 by Tina Adler

Projects designed to advance medical research and help the disabled won highest honors this week in Washington, D.C., at the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, sponsored by Westinghouse Electric Corp. in partnership with Science Service.

First place and a $40,000 scholarship went to Irene Ann Chen, 17, of La Jolla (Calif.) H.S. for her study of the role played in the spread of cancer by two genes isolated from lymphoma cells. The pem gene appears to promote angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels, while the mCAT-2 gene is involved in transporting amino acids needed for protein synthesis.

Second-place winner Tracy Caroline Phillips, 17, of Long Beach (N.Y.) H.S. won a $30,000 scholarship for her design of an electronic device that fits in a wallet and tells the visually impaired the denominations of their paper money. It converts the intensities of infrared light passing through different bills into electric signals that enable a voice chip to say each bill's value.

Martin Tibor Stiaszny, 17, of Shawnee Mission (Kan.) South H.S. won third place and a $20,000 scholarship. He compared dendritic and detergent molecules to see how to use dendrimers more effectively in creating pharmaceuticals and other compounds.

The judges awarded the fourth- through sixth-place winners $15,000 scholarships each. Samit Dasgupta, 16, of Montgomery Blair H.S. in Silver Spring, Md., came in fourth for his mathematics project expanding on Schinzel's hypothesis, which describes how often a prime number will result from plugging whole numbers into a polynomial expression.

Fifth-place winner Deborah Chuan Yeh, 18, of Plano (Texas) Senior H.S. developed a new method for detecting choline, a key molecule in the liver.

Gina Petrocelli, 17, of the Edward R. Murrow H.S. in New York City, won sixth place for her project on the attitudes and behaviors of nurses who smoke.

Four students each won $10,000 scholarships: Aleksandr Leonidovich Khazanov, 15, of Stuyvesant H.S. in New York City; Griffin M. Weber, 17, of Denbigh H.S. in Newport News, Va.; Jordan Matthew Cummins, 18, of Livingston (N.J.) H.S.; and Franz Edward Boas, 17, of La Jolla (Calif.) H.S.

The remaining 30 finalists received $1,000 scholarships each.