Sappho Gilbert

For Love of the Lab

It was the cross-eyed planaria that helped Sappho Gilbert find her passion.

Studying the freshwater flatworm was the 18-year-old's first real foray into scientific experimentation. It was her freshman year at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in the Alexandria area of Fairfax County, and she and her lab partner were examining how altering the pH of water would affect the flatworm.

"I totally fell in love with research," she said, recalling that first laboratory experience. "I felt a creativity, a sense of contribution that I'd never felt before."

Fueled by that curiosity, she moved on to more complex projects. In her sophomore year, she studied the status of premature babies in the neonatology lab at Children's National Medical Center in Washington. Her work bolstered earlier research that determined the rates of infection among premature babies could be reduced by changing the location from which their blood was drawn.

During a stint at Georgetown University, she studied the connection between childhood cancer and the environment in which children and their parents were living and found correlations between certain chemicals and cancer rates.

Last summer, she found herself working side by side with researchers in the lab at the National Institutes of Health.

The work could be tedious, but, by the end of the summer, the payoff was immense. By studying archival tissue samples from patients with the Ewing family of tumors, a group of cancers of the bone and soft tissues, she was able to determine that reducing the amount of a certain protein in cancer cells could increase the effectiveness of anti-cancer drugs.

The project won her a spot as one of 40 semifinalists in the Intel Science Talent Search, one of the nation's most prestigious scientific competitions for high school students. She didn't think her work was that big of a deal until she began chatting with other finalists.

"They were all in awe," she said. "Apparently no one else had worked with childhood cancer."

She didn't take the grand prize, but she said that didn't bother her. It's not the winning that motivates her -- although that can be fun, she said -- it's the idea that what she does in the lab has the potential to save lives, particularly the lives of young children, who "have so much to offer the world, but don't even know it."

Her freshman biology teacher and mentor, Barbara Wood, said watching Sappho's progress has been rewarding.

"She's very independent," Wood said. "She doesn't need me to hold her hand."