Girls Smash Glass Ceiling

Posted by Greg Laden on December 4, 2007
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NEW YORK – Girls swept a prestigious high school science competition for the first time Monday, winning top prizes of $100,000 scholarships for their work on potential tuberculosis cures and bone growth in zebrafish.

It was the first time girls had ever won the grand prizes in both the team and individual divisions of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology.

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The Siemens competition was begun in 1998 to recognize America’s best math and science students. Finalists were chosen at regional competitions and flown to New York for a weekend that included bowling and a Broadway show before Monday’s awards ceremony. The contest has also been known as the Siemens Westinghouse Competition.

[source]
[hat tip: CMF]

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Comments

  1. #1 ERCC-1
    December 4, 2007

    Work under the lab where the TB girls worked at Stony Brook. Apparently all they did was synthesis the molecule following protocols that were already worked out by grad students. Didn’t due anything new, just repeated some chemistry. Not really deserving of a prize in my opinion. People in the lab are very pissed (even if it is good publicity).

  2. #2 douchebag
    December 5, 2007

    ^whine whine whine

  3. #3 TS
    January 15, 2008

    Yes, all may not be as it first appears with this competition. So why was there was NO radio or TV coverage of this year’s TRULY ‘headline grabbing’ news (or should I say press release) from Siemens? And what may have happened in 2004? Do you think Siemens holds this contest simply out of the goodness of their hearts and doesn’t expect LOTS of free POSITIVE publicity in return ( I would guess $2-6M worth?) And do you have any idea of just how MASSIVELY corrupt (by its own recent admissions) Siemens AG is? Do you know that its corruption extends around the world? Do you know many executives and managers have been fired and/or indicted at Siemens over just the last year (well over 100 so far!)? Do you know that our own SEC is now investigating the company? And did you know that in 2002 Siemens had even callously planned to TRADEMARK the Zyklon name, for use in future Siemens products, even though during its Nazi collaboration period (yes NAZI collaboration!) it proudly gave this very same name (Zyklon B) to the poison gas used to kill millions of Jews! So I, personally, wouldn’t even WANT to be associated in ANY WAY with this corrupt and very unethical (formerly NAZI) company and I also think the general public and the news media, are just WAY too gullible (as we have seen many times before with WMD’s, the denial of global warming, tobacco safety, VIOXX, etc. )! Does a company such as this really deserve the kudos it regularly gets in connection with this ‘show’? Maybe Lawrence Summers may yet get the last laugh here!

    Given all this, do you STILL believe that this was all just a nobel competition worthy of celebration and without ANY possibility of duplicity on Siemens part (especially given the tremendous amounts of BAD publicity they have recently received?) And if you think that ‘at the very least’ Siemens (and the College Board) are infallible in their scientific judgments, just look further into what happened in the 2004 competition! So, sorry to rain on the parade just yet.

    Never the less, the participants in any of these competitions cannot be blamed for any of this and they ALL should be congratulated for just having entered and worked so hard on their various projects. Despite rather ‘contrived’ contests such as this (that may well have some ulterior motives) there really are no winners and losers in science, since the goal is really just to learn something new about our world (whether experiments work or don’t).
    But having said that I will be very interested to learn the truth about what really may have happened, both in 2007 and in 2004 (if not other years).

  4. #4 the real cmf
    January 15, 2008

    Yeah, but why shouldn’t companies like them NOT get in on the gravy train of girls and science, or girls and anything? After all, the old adage ‘sex sells’ has been replaced by ‘girls are disadvantaged’.