Summer toil wins science prize

Months in a lab mean top honors for Wake high-schoolers

DURHAM -- While many teenagers slept in, played all day with their Facebook profiles or headed to the beach, Sajith Wickramasekara and Andrew Guo spent the summer dutifully reporting to a Duke University research lab, working hour after hour to make tumors more sensitive to cancer drugs.

The payoff came Monday when the 17-year-old seniors at the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics took a grand prize in the prestigious national Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology.

"There is no doubt that these scholars will change the world, starting right now, with their passion for science and math," Thomas McCausland, chairman of the Siemens Foundation, said after Monday's awards announcement.

Wickramasekara and Guo won one of two grand prizes awarded from a pool of 1,205 entrants. With it comes $100,000 in college scholarship money. Winners often go on to careers in medicine or science research.

The duo is the third team from the Durham-based public, residential high school to win the award. Teams from the school also won in 2004 and 2000. The school has had more finalists for the award than any other school in the nation.

"It's pretty big for us and could open up some doors," said Wickramasekara, speaking via telephone hours after accepting the award in New York City. "It's the biggest thing to happen to us in our education."

Neither Wickramasekara, of Raleigh, nor Guo, of Cary, have made their college decisions yet.

Wickramasekara, an Eagle Scout and captain of his school's science bowl team, has narrowed his choices to Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Guo, a state champion tennis player who speaks Mandarin Chinese, will attend either Stanford or the University of Pennsylvania. Each attended Enloe High School in Raleigh before enrolling at the School of Science and Math.

Since last December, the two budding scientists knocked ideas around in a Duke University laboratory under the tutelage of Craig Bennett, a Duke oncologist. They read volume after volume and asked piles of questions, their intellectual curiosity driving their work, Bennett said.

Intellectually, they're at the level of a first-year graduate student, he said.

"They're very mature for their age," Bennett said. "They didn't fritter their summer away at the mall. They spent it here."

Wickramasekara's mother, Kushlani, said Monday that she's delighted if not surprised by her son's success. She has seen signs of his curiosity since he was young.

"He's had a passion for a lot of things from an early age," she said. "He stated making Web pages when he was 6 years old. He learned HTML himself."

In tinkering with current cancer drugs, Wickramasekara and Guo hope to better match drugs with individuals by using their genetic data, essentially making the treatment as specific as the disease. It is a field known as "personalized medicine."

Wickramasekara said he sees a day not long from now when a person can get a DNA sample taken at a health clinic. From that DNA sample, a doctor could quickly decide which of several medicines are best used to combat the person's ailment.

Guo said the award legitimizes the duo's work.

While they may head to different colleges next year, they could still continue to collaborate.

Guo plans to eventually leave medicine behind and explore a career in business; Wickramasekara hopes to continue in the field of personalized medicine and biotechnology.

"We're going to try to keep working on the same project," Guo said. "At least we know we're going in the right direction."