Access

news feature

Nature 420, 12-14 (7 November 2002) | doi:10.1038/420012a

Open Innovation Challenges

naturejobs

More science jobs
Post a job for free

Put your lab in a different class

Sally Goodman1

Top

In many countries, students are turning away from the hard sciences. Can initiatives that give young people hands-on experience of research help to lure them back? Sally Goodman goes back to school.

When the US House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform met in February to hear evidence on anthrax research, its members were handed small plastic models of one of the anthrax toxins to help explain how drugs could be developed to treat infection with the bacterium. Little did they know that this physical representation of the protein had been designed by high-school students, using crystal-structure coordinates provided by the biologists giving evidence that day.