I wish I was like you, easily amused

I was making myself a fancy dinner the other day that required chicken broth. Okay fine, it was just simple chicken and vegetable stir fry. Anyway, the smell of the chicken broth brought me back to my summer after junior year in high school. I went to a magnet school and one of the requirements for getting a “magnet diploma” was to complete a senior research project. Otherwise, you just got a normal diploma. I think only three or four of the 95 or so kids in the program didn’t do a project, two of whom (I’ve always struggled with when to use ‘whom’ so I have no idea if its appropriate there) I was pretty good friends with. We were pretty much the anti-magnets. Yeah we were smarter than most kids, but we were lazy. I ruined my mom’s dream of me becoming valedictorian in the first semester of high school with not one, but two B’s. Lucky for me, my parents aren’t the typical Asian parents. B’s were, in fact, acceptable. I was the type of student who, halfway through the semester, would figure out how few points I needed to get an A. And if I couldn’t get an A, I would figure out how little work I would have to do to get a B. But I digress…

An SRP was basically a really complicated science fair project. We had to get an internship our summer before senior year at some lab. Most kids either got internships at NIST or NIH. I think a few went to places like NOAA or the Carnegie Institute. Then first semester, we would work on a research paper that was 30+ pages. In high school, that’s like writing a 100 page term paper in college. It’s a lot of pages. Anyway, these papers would get submitted to the Intel Science Talent Search (formerly Westinghouse). It’s a nationwide competition where they select 300 semifinalists, whittle them down to 40 finalists, then 10 who receive between $20,000 and $100,000 in scholarship money. There was a kid a couple years ahead of me that won second place for some cryptology project. CIA caliber stuff. I think they even offered him a job, but he turned it down to go to MIT. Every year we would have around 15 semifinalists, the most, beating out Stuyvesant in New York and Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, which are magnet schools as well. I’d like to point out that my school, Montgomery Blair, only had 400 kids enrolled in the magnet program compared to 3,100 at Stuyvesant and about 2,000 at Thomas Jefferson. Yes, Blair is that much better than every other high school. Anyway, my year was considered a dumb year because we produced only 12 semifinalists and did not have the most. I think Stuyvesant got it that year. And no, I wasn’t a semifinalist. I don’t remember if I even submitted my paper to Intel.

My internship was at NIH in the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH, like “The Rats of NIMH”). I studied Parkinson’s Disease in rats. They would kill the dopamine receptors in one side of the brain while leaving the other side untouched. So, the rat would basically have Parkinson’s in one side and not in the other. Then both sides would get compared trying to figure out what exactly was going on. I won’t get into detail, mostly because I don’t remember much of it, but the short story is I got to slice open frozen rat brains, make a microscopic slide, and play around with cool lab equipment. It was great. One of the procedures we used was gel electrophoresis, which is used to separate RNA from DNA. Making the gel was basically like making Jell-O. Except, instead of boiling a packet of pure sugar and putting it in the fridge, we had to boil agar. Agar is the same stuff you use in petri dishes to make bacteria cultures. Funny thing was, everytime we boiled the agar the smell reminded me of wonton soup or chicken broth. In fact, it smelled exactly like those two bases for yummy food. It piqued my interest, so I went online and after exhaustive Altavista searches (this was before Google and Wikipedia) found out agar is pretty close to chicken broth. Lovely. The same stuff that they use in restaurants all the time is also used to make bacteria cultures. I don’t mean to spoil your appetites (okay maybe I do), but just think about that next time you’re in a Chinese restaurant or ordering some food based in chicken broth. YUM!