Regeneron Talent Search Winners Cure Pessimism
Regeneron Talent Search Winners Cure Pessimism
(Bloomberg View) -- Forty of the brightest scientific minds in America came together in Washington this week. They provided glimpses of a world with cheaper solar cells and without antibiotic-resistant bacteria. They provided new understandings of rare diseases and solved parts of problems that have vexed mathematicians for years.
They’re all in high school.
The Regeneron Science Talent Search, a 77-year-old research competition, just wrapped up this year’s edition, awarding $1.8 million to student scientists. I’m joining the newly created National Leadership Council of Society for Science & the Public — the nonprofit organization that runs the event — and so I had the honor of meeting many of these young Einsteins.
Their science is top-notch, often graduate-level or above. And their poise and eloquence make them extraordinary ambassadors for science.
This year’s first-place winner developed a model that could be used to predict — and hopefully preempt — outbreaks of the pathogen that caused the Irish potato famine and still assaults crops today. Other finalists provided clues to supernova formation, developed cryptographic protocols for running secure auctions, and showed that e-cigarette vapors decrease lung-cell viability even though (unlike cigarette smoke) they do not change lung-cell DNA.
Equally impressive was the collaborative spirit. Several of the finalists told stories about how they would share judges’ harder questions with each other and talk them over. Common discovery was the modus operandi, even — and perhaps especially — if it meant giving a competitor a leg up in later stages.
The finalists manage to be kids, too. They rock climb, read poetry, and apparently design dragons. And just like other high schoolers who have been on the national stage recently, they see a bright future, one that they expect to help invent.
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Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard Department of Economics. Previously, he was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and the inaugural research scholar at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago.
I also had the opportunity to advise one of them on research unrelated to his talent search project at the Center for Excellence in Education ’s Research Science Institute last summer.
Their dragons come with far more realistic design schematics and engineering plans than any I can recall imagining as a teenager.
To contact the author of this story: Scott Duke Kominers at kominers@fas.harvard.edu.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Landman at jlandman4@bloomberg.net.
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