Girls sweep science contest and make history

Girls won top honours for the first time in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology...

Girls won top honours for the first time in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, one of the nation’s most coveted student science awards, which were announced on Monday at New York University.

Janelle Schlossberger and Amanda Marinoff, both 17 and seniors at Plainview-Old Bethpage John F Kennedy High School on Long Island, split the first prize — a $100,000 scholarship — in the team category for creating a molecule that helps block the reproduction of drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria. 16-year-old Isha Himani Jain, of Indian origin, a senior at Freedom High School in Bethlehem, Pa., placed first in the individual category for her studies of bone growth in zebra fish, whose tail fins grow in spurts, similar to the way children’s bones do. She will get a $100,000 scholarship.

The three girls’ victories is “wonderful news, but I can’t honestly say it’s shocking,” said Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Hopkins helped start a national discussion about girls and science two years ago when she walked out of a talk by Harvard University’s president, Lawrence H Summers, after he suggested that innate differences between men and women might be one reason that fewer women than men succeed in math and science careers

“Why do people think girls can’t do science?” Hopkins said on Monday. “Where did this crazy idea ever come from?” James Whaley, president of the Siemens Foundation, which oversees the competition for Siemens AG, a global electronics and engineering company, said the competition results send a great message to young women.

Alicia Darnell, 17, a senior at Pelham Memorial High School in New York, won second place and a $50,000 scholarship in the individual category for research that identified genetic defects that could play a role in the development of Lou Gehrig’s disease.

This year, more than 1,600 students nationwide entered the Siemens competition. Eleven of the finalists were girls. It was the first year that girls outnumbered boys in the final round. Most of the finalists attend public school.

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On Sunday, the students gave 12-minute presentations of their projects. One of the most popular was by three home-schooled girls from Pennsylvania and New Jersey — Caroline Lang, 16; Rebecca Ehrhardt, 15; and Naomi Collipp, 16 — who used a Power Point presentation to demonstrate their “Burgercam” monitoring system. It is designed to determine when E coli bacteria in hamburgers have been safely eliminated by measuring the shrinkage of each patty when fully cooked.