The science fair Big One

The Science Talent Search is not your regular high school science fair. It’s a hard-core competition, with research done in cutting edge academic labs around the country.

Yesterday, President Obama signed a memo outlining his direction for the future of science. After that, the future of science walked through his office — the finalists of the annual Intel Science Talent Search. WHYY’s health and science reporter Kerry Grens spoke with one of the students in the competition.

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The Science Talent Search is not your regular high school science fair. It’s a hard-core competition, with research done in cutting edge academic labs around the country. And a grand prize of $100,000. This year, just one student from Pennsylvania made the cut with 40 students to go to the final round in D.C. this week. Seventeen-year-old Janet Song is from Audubon. She worked at Drexel to develop a method to detect tumor DNA in urine.

Song: Why this is something that’s really important to do, is because currently we don’t have a lot of screening tests for a lot of different types of cancers. And then for the ones we do have, for example for colorectal cancer for colonoscopy, these tests are highly invasive and there’s a lot of risks associated with them. So many who should get these tests don’t.

Janet Song will find out this evening whether she won the competition.