What happens when you let smart teenagers play with their passions

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Love this: Two and a half years ago, a high school freshman called up a cell biologist and asked him to "give her a try in his lab.' This month, Raina Jain of Freedom High School in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, won the International BioGENEius Challenge—a sort-of mega science fair—with a project to test which type of surfaces are best for growing the precursor cells that could one day be used to create bone implants.

Kudos to Dr. Matthias Falk, of Lehigh University, for giving Jain that proverbial try. I wish more high schoolers had the opportunity to poke their noses around laboratories and learn about the things they think are cool in a way that allows them to go as far as their brains can reach. This is just simply something you can't get in a high school class that has to teach the basics to everybody.

The fact that Jain's folks are a doctor and a materials scientist probably helped a lot on cluing her into potential opportunities. It's not something that would have ever occurred to me as a possibility when I was that age. Hopefully, this post will inspire other young brains to reach out to older ones—and vice versa.

Image provided by Flickr user x_ray_delta_one