Girls and Science
In Google's first ever Global Science Fair, over 10,000 students from 91 countries submitted science experiments. The winners in each age bracket: all Americans, all girls. The overall winner of the contest was Ms. Shree Bose. For her experiment,
Ms. Bose looked at a chemotherapy drug, cisplatin, that is commonly taken by women with ovarian cancer. The problem is that the cancer cells tend to grow resistant to cisplatin over time, and Ms. Bose set out to find a way to counteract that.
She found the answer in a cellular energy protein known as AMPK, or adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase. She observed that when AMPK was paired with cisplatin at the beginning of treatment the combination diminished the effectiveness of cisplatin. But added later on, when the cancer cells were growing resistant, the AMPK worked to maintain the effectiveness of cisplatin, allowing it to continue killing the malignant cells, at least in cell cultures.
A major coup on its own, this research becomes all the more impressive when you find out that the winning researcher, Shree Bose, is only 17-years old and not yet a senior in high school.
Take that Lawrence Summers!
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Re: Girls and Science
The more interesting question is: where are the boys? Something like 60% of all college graduates now are women. They are flourishing. America's young men are falling by the wayside, and next to no one cares.
Feb '10
Re: Girls and Science
I graded homework for a few freshman computer science classes in college.
My observation: the 3 girls in the class were consistently very good. Not genius-good, but consistently very good. The 20+ guys were all over the map from horrible to genius.
My hypothesis: for many guys, it seems natural to go into the sciences. The reason may be from the legitimate ("I really like science and am good at it") to the insane ("hey, I like computer games, so I would make a good programmer-- besides, everything else bores me, so what other choice do I have").
For girls, however, the idea of going into science doesn't come so naturally (or is not encouraged as much). The girls who are in science, are there for a very good reason-- they were born for it and they know it strongly enough to overcome the societal (?) or natural (?) male bias in the sciences.
There are differences between girls and boys-- it may truly be a more natural fit for guys to go into the sciences-- on average. But there are always outliers, and we should encourage them whether boys or girls, to go where they are made to fit.
Dec '10
Re: Girls and Science
Just where did this young woman obtain AMPK and cisplatin? I see the hand of Mommy/Daddy in this. Reminds me of the cub scout pine-wood derby, where cubs show up with cars they obviously did not make.
Feb '10
Re: Girls and Science
To the contrary, this trend worries me as well. We should now have "men's studies" in college and find ways to encourage boys and men to step up and be responsible. Because of feminism's excesses, though, it's not politically correct to say this.
However, I hesitate to say that women are necessarily "flourishing." Perhaps by comparison.
Broken families seem to be the biggest cause of male failures. The anti-male headwind in the popular culture is to some degree both a cause and an effect of this.
But the biggest factor I see is that male culture itself is broken. Our boys, growing up, tend to focus on superficial and external things, because that's what culture and other boys/men teach them. Where are the inner strengths and virtues? Where is true character being taught? If they don't see it lived out at home with their father, they have little chance of seeing it elsewhere.
Nov '10
Re: Girls and Science
Oh, science fairs. What are the odds, do you think, that any of these kids did a substantial portion of the research for which they're now being rewarded?
99% of the time, when a 15 year old wins a prize for cancer research, you'll find that their parents or other relatives are (coincidentally, no doubt) cancer researchers working on the same subject. You'll find that kids who didn't have parental help and actually did their own research are usually only capable of work that is, well, childlike. And they don't get any prizes.
But am I bitter? No!
Sep '10
Re: Girls and Science
This phenom "Where are the boys?" has has been quite extensively reported on by (name escapes me at the moment) but someone or sometwo at City Journal. Remember the good old days when feminists were seeking "parity" with men?
Jul '11
Re: Girls and Science
My boys all behave well. The school gives them their amphetamines each morning and all original thought is as expunged as their desire to run and play tag. God forbid we should return to those days when boys ran and played, perish the thought. Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails are far more scary to indoctrinate than a ritalin zombie.
May '11
Re: Girls and Science
I never understood the claim that girls were less capable in math and science. When I was in school, I never copied from a boy's test paper.
Feb '10
Re: Girls and Science
Here's a bit of dry geek humor.
At one computer science university, they came up with a statistic to measure the gender ratio of the classes. They called it the "Dave-to-babe ratio." That is, the number of guys named David, to the number of girls. It was typically close to 1:1.
So although I agree that boys in general are falling behind, we could definitely still use more girls in my field.
Edited on Jul 19, 2011 at 9:40amMar '11
Re: Girls and Science
Here me roar!
Feb '10
Re: Girls and Science
Also ignored by the headline (ahem, Diane)-- the winners were all Americans. Americans. So yes the spirit of innovation is still alive in our country.
Let's not let it die out. It still has a fighting chance.
Give kids a chance to play in the real outdoors world, not just in artificial environments all the time. Teach kids the value of real, hard, physical work. There's nothing wrong with getting your hands dirty and doing things the old-fashioned way once in a while. Hard work will teach them the value of study and innovation.
De-glamorize, even stigmatize, methods of making money that are based just on luck, fame, good looks, or taking from others without providing good value in return.
Don't give them everything. Make them work for some things.
Hire teachers from industry. Fire teachers who don't do well.
Get government out of the way. Let people do more for themselves-- don't baby them from cradle to grave, or you'll get infantile behavior into the "golden" years.
And above all, encourage families, and especially fathers, to stay together and take responsibility for each other.
Dec '10
Re: Girls and Science
Busy System Admin:
De-glamorize, even stigmatize, methods of making money that are based just on luck, fame, good looks, or taking from others without providing good value in return.
Jul 19 at 9:51am
This could result in movies where there are loves scenes with people with my level of attractiveness. {gag}
Jun '10
Re: Girls and Science
"Give kids a chance to play in the real outdoors world, not just in artificial environments all the time."
Well...actually, nothing could be more artificial than the world of big time science fairs, like Intel. As Foxman say, the hand of mom & dad are likely involved. It's much more sophisticated than just mom & dad, though. There are scores of high school and university programs "facilitating" these science kids in presenting and preparing projects.
Sadly, the days of October Sky are long gone. No kid with a natural science curiosity who tinkers in his dad's shop would stand a chance of being recognized any longer.
An out-of-state friend's kid was searching the internet as he researched his idea (in a very well organized and well funded high school science research class) and kept coming across my husband's name. (It's not a common one.) Small world --- my husband worked on & held patents in the very narrow subject this kid wanted to research. Hubby hooked him up with one of his academic contacts who took the kid under his wing. State wide recognition followed.
Nice kid. Hard worker. But connections were essential.
Jun '10
Re: Girls and Science
"For girls, however, the idea of going into science doesn't come so naturally (or is not encouraged as much"
Not true about the encouragement. The number of science programs for young girls and high schoolers is astounding. In fact, my family has personally experienced the disdain focused on top math/science females who chose to study something more traditionally "female" in college. How dare she blaze her own path and not follow the feminist agenda.
It's as if nobody has noticed the 60/40 gap in female/male college attendance. If you have a minority girl or know of one, she can attend science programs for free all over the country.
If you carefully read Lawrence Summers or The Bell Curve you will see that there is nothing untrue about the premise of males being outliers, and thus more likely to be at the tippy top of the math science world. Nobody criticized women as individual scientists, and there are absolutely plenty of brilliant ladies out there in the labs. But Summers simply pointed to the fact that the outliers are more often male. And he was crucified for speaking the truth.
Jun '10
Re: Girls and Science
A quick eyeballing of the finalists suggests that the girls submitted biology/medical based projects and the boys submitted technology based projects. Now if someone has the time they can prove me wrong, because I did nothing more than keep mental score on names that were obviously male or female. There are names where the gender of the named is not clear, so I didn't count the project. Put simply I don't have the time to do the research today.
As for interjecting Lawrence Summers into the debate, Diane, what did he actually say? Because if you look at the finalists in this science fair and divide by gender you may find significant differences in what projects were submitted based on gender as my quick eyeballing suggests.
As for male/female bell-curve distributions: Mean intelligence male = female, variance male > female. Variance means more male morons and more male geniuses. Perhaps that is what Lawrence Summers was trying to get at, but the hysterical females on the faculty got the vapors. I might from that bit of evidence conclude that females getting vapors > males getting vapors, Q.E.D.
Mar '11
Re: Girls and Science
Congratulations to the young women and to their American exceptionalism, but as for the boys Christina Hoff Sommers explained it 10 years ago in her book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men.
Edited on Jul 19, 2011 at 10:29amJun '10
Re: Girls and Science
StickerShock, you and I make essentially the same point. I regret that I was writing while you were posting, and had there been a longer delay between your post and mine, I would not have infringed on your argument.
Jun '10
Re: Girls and Science
The Bell Curve and The War Against Boys explain this achievement gap well.
Cas, I've also seen the technology projects with practical applications getting less recognition than the bio based stuff. I am too lazy to look up the numbers, but the numbers of girls entering college as bio majors is huge.
Jun '10
Re: Girls and Science
Not infringed at all -- I wish more posters would jump in on the topic. It's a serious one and we don't seem to be addressing it well in our schools!
Jul '11
Re: Girls and Science
I have been contemplating this topic all morning. When i was a polymer chemist at the Naval Ocean Systems Center there was a husband wife PHD scientist team with a boy and a girl child. We had the discussion about women and science and their conclusions were that top women were the same as top men but the average man could function in a scientific world whereas the average woman would struggle. Lord knows what has become of those children who must be discovering all sorts of new minutia these days.