Along with a handful of her Big Sky High School classmates, Gates is working in a research laboratory at the University of Montana. In assistant professor Klara Briknarova's “Mouse House,” the 17-year-old senior perfects her skill in the days-long process of stripping DNA molecules out of E.coli bacteria cells and reforming them in “zinc fingers” that reveal the three-dimensional features of the protein chain.
Those shapes literally are the keys that may unlock how the proteins connect with other parts of cells and trigger their functions.
It's also a little career-focusing effort on the part of Big Sky science teachers Jim Harkins and David Jones. Over the years, the teachers have used their relationships with university researchers to help promising students go beyond the textbooks. This year, they placed seven Big Sky students, along with some from Hellgate and Sentinel high schools, in active lab work.
Mariah Coley is winding up her third year as a high school lab rat in professor Sandy Ross' biophysics lab. While she's enjoyed juggling test tubes in the organic chemistry area, she's also been fascinated with the laser room, where her reductions go through spectral analysis.
Coley, 18, graduated last spring and is headed for Dartmouth College this fall. When she gets there, Ross said, she'll be one of the few incoming freshmen who've been a co-author in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
“I've been working with high school students for the past 25 years,” Ross said. “They're as good as the grad students half the time, or they get to be that good. This is a great way to decide if you love this or hate it.”
Some fellowships stem directly from high school-oriented grant programs intended to attract teens into university labs. But as those funds have dried up, Ross said, many professors are using their own discretionary grant budgets to keep the high school channel open.
“They don't work for hours here,” Ross said. “They work to get the job done. So I want someone interested and motivated to be here. I take students who want to do something for themselves. This is a teaching situation, and I treat it that way.”
New technology has made it easier to depict that aesthetic side of science, Ross said. Lasers break molecular structures into readable rainbows of light. Nuclear magnetic resonance scanners produce three-dimensional pictures of those molecules. In the span of his own career, Ross said, the new imaging methods have made it much easier to explain cutting-edge science to beginners.
“The idea is to get people interested and then let them play with it,” he said. “It helps scientists interact with the community.”
For Coley, Gates and the other Missoula students, the fellowships provide up to $2,000 a year in spending money along with invaluable college-level experience for their resumes. And it helps clarify a possible career field that can seem mystifying when seen through a high school textbook.
“Working in science makes you think in a different way that English (class) does,” Coley said. “It's not just learning the periodic table of elements. It's thinking mathematically and creatively.”
“It doesn't really feel like a job,” she added. “It's the lab. It's my home - my sandbox.”
Reporter Rob Chaney can be reached at 523-5382 or at rchaney@missoulian.com
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