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NIH's Own Olympics
Poster Day Displays Young Talent

By Rich McManus

On the Front Page...

It is NIH's version of the Summer Olympics, only it's held every year and the participants are more fully clad. Poster Day 1996, held Aug. 2, and featuring a record 390 students from 41 states, the District of Columbia and Guam, was like Atlanta's Centennial Park, only without the inflated beer cans and with a higher average IQ.

Continued...

Harvard's Marian Lee explains her work.

Hard to believe that a single season could result in so much productivity. Ranging in age from high schoolers to graduate students, the youngsters — many of whom have spent multiple summers working here — filled most of the first floor lobby in Bldg. 10, plus the Visitor Information Center, turning the spaces into a vibrant scientific shopping mall as various, with respect to subject, as Tyson's Corner or White Flint.

It was a place where a District teenager could speak offhandedly about "a subunit of a novel adaptor protein complex," and a graduate of an Episcopal high school in Richmond could casually describe working on "a flow pump that replicates blood flow through the aorta, sending out pulsatile waveforms." No summer of burger-flipping and gaspump jockeying for this bunch.

While many of the kids are inalterably committed to medical careers, having presumably been born pre-med, some are still openminded about the future, treating summer-at-NIH as simply one delectation among a menu of intellectual delights.

High-schooler Kathryn O'Reilly points out data she gathered in an NICHD laboratory.

Such is the attitude of Marian Lee, a rising sophomore at Harvard who has the cheek, even after two summers at NIH and four in laboratory work, to remain open to the possibility of a career in history or government.

"I've always been interested in the sciences," she said, "but falling into the lab was somewhat of an accident. A teacher in high school (Winston Churchill High in Potomac) encouraged me to pursue it, and ever since then I just keep coming back."

Lee, who just wrapped up a summer at NICHD's Developmental Endocrinology Branch, was in an NIMH lab last year. The two prior years she spent at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) doing work on AIDS vaccines and protein regulators.

Supriya Jagannath (l) explains her poster to colleague.

She came to a new NIH institute this year because she "wanted to try something different. I kind of wanted to see another side." Her preceptors, Drs. Jian Zhou and Carolyn Bondy, "gave me a crash course at first — lots of specific information. I did a lot of reading at the library. They did a real good job of bringing home to me the implications — in practical terms — of these huge words. Some babies are born too small, and they're asking why."

She said it's been "real exciting" working at NIH, but is not convinced that physicianship is for her. "Everybody around here is always talking about what medical schools they're applying to. My mentor told me to leave my options open, things are really opening up for women in many fields.

"I really feel torn now," Lee admitted. "I'm not closing any doors yet, but I'm not sure about medical school."

Untroubled by such misgivings is Supriya Jagannath, who just finished her fourth summer here, and who once took a full year off from school to work at NIH. A rising junior biology major in George Washington University's 7-year B.A./M.D. program, she is headed for a medical career — "probably in clinical research" — the way sprinter Michael Johnson was headed for dual track golds in Atlanta: with alacrity.

The graduate of Rockville's Wootton High got into a Howard Hughes Medical Institute-sponsored internship at NIAAA the summer after 10th grade, and returned there again after 11th grade. Curious about other fields, she spent the next two summers with Dr. Johanna Moller at NINDS studying demyelinating disorders such as multiple sclerosis, neuro-AIDS and the leukodystrophies. She hopes to work here part-time during senior year at GW.

"I've always had an interest in science," Jagannath relates, "and its problem-solving nature, its logical nature.

"Initially, I had the misconception that scientists were different from me, and living in their own little world," she said. "I've found that they're just like me, and I'm very comfortable. [My preceptors] are so willing to teach and help me. I couldn't be more grateful. I feel more like they're my friends than my bosses.

"To me, NIH is like a fun summer school," she concluded. "I would never find so many other goal-oriented college students to learn from and encourage me anywhere else."

A rookie in the summer program, sponsored by NIH's Office of Education, is Kathryn O'Reilly, a rising senior at Georgetown Visitation high school in D.C. She had applied to the same HHMI program that admitted Jagannath, "but they didn't have space for me so they nominated me to NICHD," which accepted her on the strength of work she had done — on the biochemistry of lipid extraction — as a sophomore for a local science fair, and as a hospital volunteer.

Interested in molecular biology, O'Reilly learned of NIH through a chemistry teacher at Visitation. She spent last year at WRAIR assaying the toxicity of anti-AIDS drugs. This summer she was with Dr. Juan Bonifacino at NICHD, studying what goes wrong in the body "when exocytosis goes awry."

Chantiste Beal came all the way from California to study at NIH this summer. She is a senior at Charles Drew University in Los Angeles.

Planning to take advanced placement biology and chemistry courses in the coming year, O'Reilly said she "definitely learned a lot of science here. I did library research to see what the procedures we were doing in the lab meant." She plans a pre-med college career, and wants a joint M.D./Ph.D. eventually. "I want to combine clinical and research careers," she said.

Also on her way to med school is Ann-Robin Anthony of St. Catherine's School in Richmond, who will go to Duke this fall after three summers at NIH, the last two in NHLBI's Laboratory of Cardiac Energetics.

Her interest in medicine caught fire 3 years ago when she attended Mini-Med School, taught by professors from the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond. Dr. Bruce Fuchs, who launched the MCV program and successfully transplanted it to NIH, advised her to consider summer work at NIH and even offered to put her up if she came.

Ann-Robin Anthony, a Richmond high school student, begins pre-med studies at Duke this fall.

"I've loved it here, so I have come back every summer," said Anthony, who boards at the Fuchs residence during the summer.

She spent her first summer in NIMH's Laboratory of Biological Psychiatry, then shifted to NHLBI to study magnetic resonance. Among her projects has been examination of blood flow in patients with coronary artery disease compared to normal volunteers.

"I will definitely take pre-med courses at Duke, along with some biomedical engineering," she said. Next summer, she plans to gain clinical experience working with last year's preceptor, Tim Ryschon, a pediatrician now at an Indian reservation in Nebraska. "Then I'll be back to [NHLBI] two summers from now, with some biomedical engineering courses under my belt."

While medals of actual gold were not distributed at Poster Day, some students were recognized as outstanding among their peers. NINDS, which sponsored the largest number of students, bestowed its Exceptional Summer Student Award on 25 interns, including Jagannath, at a ceremony Aug. 6.