High-School Researchers

The laboratory on the third floor of the old Central High School in Evansville, Ind. gleams incongruously with the sleek, modern equipment of college and industrial biochemistry. There, this week, a select group of five students will move into one of the most ambitious high-school science projects in the nation: to identify and isolate all the amino acids in ordinary fruit. To pay the bills, the Federal Government's National Institutes of Health last year gave $2,300, the only research grant it has ever made to a high school.

The man who persuaded NIH to invest in high-school students is Robert Lee Silber, 29-year-old head of the science department at Central. Silber has his own special brand of mild-mannered determination, e.g., to work his way through Evansville College, he scrubbed floors in a slaughterhouse. He hit on his present project in the summer of 1956, when he did not have time to finish some research work on amino acids at NIH before school reopened. Encouraged by NIH biochemist Filadelfo Irreverre, Silber asked NIH for a grant to carry on the work with his students back at Central. The grant came through last November.

Under Silber's direction, five top seniors met two afternoons a week from 3:30 to 6. By the end of the school year, they had ground five varieties of fruit in a blender, whirled the fruit mixed with pure ethyl alcohol in a centrifuge to separate the solid matter, run the remaining solution through ion exchange columns to remove the salts, and then removed the water to isolate the pure amino acid extract. This year's group of five students will start to identify the acids. Silber pays his boys and girls 35-c- an hour ("enough for bus fare and supper money, but not enough to make the project a job"), often has to shoo them out of the lab at night.

"Science has been passed up on the high-school level," says Silber. "It usually is presented in an uninteresting manner, and as a result, the students are shying away. I'm sure we're helping to break down that barrier." Silber can prove his point. All five of last year's seniors are going to college, will either major in science subjects or take many such courses along the way.

But despite successes in attracting young minds to science, Silber is not certain that he will be able to finish his project. Reason: his money runs out in December. He has asked NIH for another $6,700, but at week's end was still sweating out a decision. If NIH was keeping mum about Silber's request, one official was willing to pass out some high praise for Teacher Silber: "He is an enthusiastic and very competent scientist."

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