Working Life - Masako's New York Science competition By Masako Yamada	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
科学研究コンテストの審査員を務める 先日、雅子さんは、上司からある科学研究コンテストの審査員のボランティアに誘われました。気軽に引き受けたまではよかったのですが、ふたを開けてみれば、それは高校生のノーベル賞といわれるほど立派なコンテストの地区予選の審査員という大役でした。では、どれほどすごいコンテストなのか、見てみましょう。

科学研究コンテストで自分の研究結果を発表する生徒（左）

Until I arrived at the competition site, I didn't know that my boss was asking us to be judges in the regional round of the Intel Science Talent Search. This is like the Nobel Prize for high-school students, where students present results of original research. It turns out there's a similar contest for junior high-school students as well.

Coincidentally, just a few days before the event, I'd read a comment by a high-school teacher in Massachusetts about this competition. She said she didn't encourage her students to enter. She felt that certain students had an unfair advantage because they had better access to resources. For instance, if the parents are scientists, they can procure lab space and equipment. If a student goes to a famous high school with connections to a local university, that student can easily find a volunteer advisor without having to make cold-calls to strangers.

A quick glance at the competition entries revealed two levels of quality. Half of the projects were extremely polished and so technically involved that my boss and I felt unable to judge them fairly. Half of the projects were sloppy, unoriginal and contained obvious errors. For example, one girl used four pieces of university-quality equipment for her study; another girl just printed out a few diagrams from the Internet to form her conclusions.

I decided to judge the junior high-school division, since I could at least understand all the projects! Each judge had a scorecard, and we tallied the total number of points per project. We also tried to acknowledge the strengths of some projects that weren't in the top three, but still had merits. The point of this kind of contest is to encourage kids to love science, so we didn't want to criticize any of the projects. At the same time, the majority of us agreed that a few of them were clearly superior. We all tried hard not to be fooled by the presence of fancy equipment and over-involved advisors.

In my favorite project, the student asked members of his church with high blood pressure to take vitamin C for a week, garlic pills for a week, and then both for a week. He measured their blood pressure every other day to see whether it went down. Based on prior studies, he hypothesized that the vitamin C would have no effect, and that the garlic would decrease blood pressure. Sure enough, this was the case. His new result was that taken in combination, vitamin C and garlic pills can reduce blood pressure even more, but when the subjects stopped taking the garlic pills, their blood pressure went back to high. I felt I really learned something new from his study, and I could tell he did most of the work himself.

The winner's project was also excellent. She was interested in the kinds of bacteria produced by animals and she grew fecal bacteria herself to examine which animals produce certain kinds of bacteria. I liked that she did a lot of unglamorous work herself, including collecting feces from animals, storing samples in her home refrigerator (her mom was not too happy) and observing them at her kitchen table.

Please keep in mind that these exciting studies were conducted by students only 13 years old. When I was that age, I had absolutely no thought of doing my own research project. It wasn't until I entered graduate school that I realized how difficult it is to form an original hypothesis and conduct experiments to prove it. In this sense, all of the contestants were very precocious, indeed.

Shukan ST: May 2, 2003

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