Boy & Girl Scientists

Forty of the nation's smartest teen-age youngsters whooped into Washington last week for a week of fun, sightseeing and a competition to choose the likeliest boy & girl scientists in the U.S. They were finalists in the third annual science talent search run by the news agency Science Service. They had tea in the White House with Eleanor Roosevelt before she went off to Puerto Rico. They chatted with Vice President Wallace, hobnobbed with eminent elder scientists, swarmed irreverently through the halls of Congress and the endless corridors of the Pentagon.

The 40 were the survivors among 15,000 high-school seniors who had entered a grueling competition of scientific aptitude tests, essays, school work and interviews.* They were competing for two top scholarships of $2,400 each and a number of lesser ones offered by Westinghouse Electric & Mfg. Co., a partner in the project. The tests are so tough that the 300 who get honorable mention each year are automatically assured college scholarships. College offers have ranged up to $10,000 to a prizewinner. At last week's end, the judges, headed by famed Harvard Astronomer Harlow Shapley, picked as the best of the 1944 field:

Boy. Amber Charles Davidson, 17, a stocky, curly-haired Mormon farm boy of Fort Bridger, Wyo. Besides running his father's farm (his father runs a garage), Amber paints, plays the cornet, is light-heavyweight boxing champion of Bridger Valley, captained his high-school (Lyman Seminary) football team. A self-taught scientist, he began to put motors together at six, now has a departmentalized one-man laboratory with separate booths for research in electronics, photography, radio, lens grinding, chemistry, astronomy, biology. He has built a radio-controlled boat, is working on two projects in which he thinks the Army may be interested: 1) a searchlight of invisible infrared or ultraviolet light for seeing and signaling at night, 2) a method of broadcasting waves of the same frequency as ordinary sound. Girl. Anne Hagopian, 16, a Manhattan architect's daughter. Small, dark Anne learned her science from books and at Manhattan's swank Brearley School. Like Amber, she is an athlete, musician (piano) and likes to paint. A specialist in atomic theories, she plans to go to Radcliffe and become a research physicist.

* Sample test question: "There are four embryonic membranes in vertebrates--the yoke sac, the allantois, the amnion and the chlorion. The amnion and chlorion are formed by a fold of the somatopleure. . . . " Problem: to locate these on a diagram.

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