It’s not every day that high school students get to research a possible cure for type 1 diabetes. But that’s exactly what students at The Ethel Walker School in Connecticut are doing through a collaboration with Stanford University.
The students work with Stanford’s Seung Kim Lab and are given “the opportunity to have an a-ha moment, a moment of discovery, when they created something that had never been created before,” said Dr. Seung Kim, a physician scientist who runs the lab and has partnerships with 20 high schools around the world.
Kim’s goal is to allow students “to experience science through experiments and not merely through books and lectures,” and to one day find a cure for type 1 diabetes.
It’s a lofty goal that starts with researching new strains of a humble insect: the fruit fly.
“Fruit flies have had a large role in modern biology and genetic studies. In the case of our own work, we discovered almost 25 years ago, the cells in fruit flies that make insulin and the insect version of glucagon are important hormones that regulate your metabolism,” he said. “In humans, they're crucial and also related to diabetes. One of the things we hope to do is understand better how to make replacement islet cells that are lost in diabetes.”
Other researchers have since discovered that a hormone in fruit flies can help scientists understand how humans regulate their metabolism, according to a 2021 study published in the journal Nature. The finding could one day have implications for new medications in humans.
Nellie Kenney, now a freshman in Yale University, is keen on science. But she wasn’t that way until she signed up for a biology class out of curiosity when she was at The Ethel Walker School.
“My interest in biology was born out of this class more than my interest in the class was born out of biology,” she said. “I think for most of my life, I've thought of science classes as the classes where you memorize facts, and you have to get to the end goal, which is knowing something which is already known.”
In that class, Kenney worked to discover new fruit fry strains, and her teacher Suzanne Piela was delighted – both with the strains that did not survive, and the ones that did.
“This class has been super fun. I love that my students are doing authentic research,” Piela said. “Some of the stuff we're doing is really hard, we're doing college level and beyond stuff in this class. They were fearless and they did all the things we needed to do.”
This past year, Ethel Walker students introduced seven new strains of fruit fly to the Stanford lab. And the school says more students are signing on to the class to get a feel for hands-on biology.
