The 14-year-old winner of this year’s “Top Young Scientist” competition says she’s always wondered if it was possible to put an end to world hunger.
The question inspired Neela Thangada to develop a research project that involved cloning potatoes and then studying them under different conditions. The ninth-grader from San Antonio said her goal was to prove that “cloning potatoes accelerates plant growth and promotes higher yields.”
Thangada says she came up with the idea after getting a firsthand look at poverty in India and seeing pictures of suffering in Africa and Central America. Read the full MSNBC report.
Out of an original field of thousands of middle-school students across the United States, 14-year-old Neela Thangada (on the left) was chosen today as "America's Top Young Scientist of the Year" by a panel of judges at the Discovery Channel Young Scientist Challenge (DCYSC).
Learn more about the Discovery Channel's science contest.
Inspired by a biology textbook's idea of a potato cloning experiment, Neela set out to explore plant cloning. She wanted to determine how different nutrient concentrations affected the multiple stages of growth in a potato.
Neela removed 60 shoot tips growing from potatoes. After sterilizing the tips, she excised the bottom two segments, the meristem and primordial. She placed each in a test tube of half-strength or full-strength nutrient solution and incubated them. During her first trial, all the samples became contaminated. Neela persevered and redid the entire experiment, finding that the potato clones did indeed grow better in the full-strength solution.
Visit the Discovery Channel 2005 Finalists and Winners page.
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