Twelfth-graders research cancer at Cold Spring lab

Joshua Weiss remembers when he first got interested in science.

"I was about 4 or 5, and I was at the beach with my mom," said Weiss, 18, a spring graduate of Smithtown High School East, "and I asked her why the sky was blue."

His mother, Denise Weiss, a production manager at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, answered that the sky reflected the blue of the ocean. But then he asked why the water was blue - "and she said it reflected the sky," he said.

Even then, "I knew that both statements couldn't be right. I became obsessed about learning about the natural world."

And a scientist was born.

Weiss and two other recent graduates - Nikita Anand, 17, of Cold Spring Harbor High School, and Norah Liang, 18, of Patchogue-Medford High School - worked on original cancer research at Cold Spring Harbor Lab throughout their senior year. They did "real cutting-edge stuff that we haven't done before," said Alea Mills, associate professor at the lab and a leading cancer researcher. The three were among seven in Partners for the Future, a 20-year-old program that brings seniors to work with the lab's top researchers.

Enthusiasm counts

"They have to be really excited about science," Mills said of the candidates. And the mentors respond. "It's sort of a match," she said.

Students must be nominated by their science teachers. Once accepted, each spends about 10 hours a week at the lab.

In the spring, the three presented their findings at a lab symposium And soon all will be going to top colleges: Weiss to Duke University, Liang to Harvard and Anand to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

"I studied four genes that have been, historically speaking, usually associated with cancer, and one gene that has been associated with fertility, at least in female mice," said Weiss, whose mentor was assistant professor Gurinder Singh Atwal, an expert in population genetics. Weiss wrote a computer program analyzing data from a fertility clinic in Manhattan.

Liang worked with Mills, who in 2007 identified CHD5, a cancer-suppressing gene. In Liang's project, "CHD5: The Body's Defender," she studied how the gene acts to suppress the growth of tumors, and how mutations in the gene disable its anti-cancer effects. She tested the impact of altered CHD5 on the ability of the cells to multiply. "You could see how CHD5 could slow down the growth of a tumor," Liang said.

Anand's mentor was professor Gregory Hannon, who studies the biology of cancer, particularly breast and pancreatic cancers. He advised her on her project, "Coloring Cancer: A New Genetic Tool," in which she used an enzyme that labeled cells by color in an effort to track individual cancer cells.

"If you have a cancer growth, you need to be able to tell if that resulted from a cancer stem cell," said Anand, who began tracking cells with color in her junior year at the lab's Dolan DNA Learning Center, the world's first science center devoted entirely to genetics education. She took a lab course that taught basic techniques in molecular biology research. Her technique partly involves the use of a gel that separates the DNA pieces through a process called electrophoresis. "There's so much to learn about cancer," Anand said. "The first step to curing cancer is to actually figure out what cancer is."

Anand said her favorite part of the experience was that "you weren't just somebody doing research here - you became a scientist, essentially."

Personal interest in cancer Liang's project was a continuation of one she had begun at Brookhaven National Laboratory the previous summer. Cancer affected her grandmother and other relatives, she said, "so I've always been interested in it." She said the Cold Spring Harbor scientists "do a really good job of catching you up."

And Weiss, whose project was called "Infertility and Cancer: A Genetic Connection," analyzed genes involved in determining fertility that are also implicated in cancer. He studied P53, a powerful anti-cancer gene that also helps regulate a fertility-related gene called leukemia inhibitory factor.

"What they found is that this factor determines a mother's degree of fertility more than any other factor, which is a new finding," Mills said. "Whatever project the students work on, it moves the field forward."