CTY (Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth) helps map research plans

When Megan Blewett was a sixth-grader in Madison, New Jersey, she asked for a neuroscience textbook for Christmas. She got it, and became fascinated by multiple sclerosis. Two years later, she began mapping the incidence of MS in her home state. By high school, she had expanded her study to the entire United States, plus broadened the scope to include diseases she thought might be related to MS, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Lyme disease.

Megan Blewett: "MS has a lot of mystery to it." Photo by Charles Votaw

After five years of work, the 17-year-old now has concluded that the incidence of MS and Lyme disease, and of MS and ALS, overlap geographically. She has also compiled the most comprehensive database of Lyme disease incidence in the United States.

"My basic research approach has been to couple epidemiology and biochemistry," says Blewett, who got her first taste of neuroscience research in a 2004 Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth class. "I look at the geographical distribution of diseases and then try to find biochemical explanations of those diseases. It's really interesting stuff." After she first read about MS, Blewett spent a year reading the literature on the disease in her spare time. When she realized that a growing body of evidence links MS to the environment, she found data from the Centers for Disease Control online and used mapping software to plot the incidence of the disease. At a science fair during her sophomore year, she noticed that a neighboring town had a high prevalence not only of MS but also of Lyme disease. That's when she decided to expand her geo-spatial statistical analysis to include other ailments.

For her work on MS, Blewett won first place and a $50,000 scholarship in the College Board's Young Epidemiology Scholars Competition, plus a $20,000 scholarship for finishing seventh out of 1,700 students competing in this year's Intel Science Talent Search. In June she presented her research to the Congressional Biomedical Research Caucus on Capitol Hill, at the invitation of Nobel laureate chemist Dudley R. Herschbach.

Herschbach says that Blewett's analysis of CDC data showed a remarkable maturity of outlook. "She has keen insight and an alert instinct to recognize significant clues and devise means to test her ideas," he says.

Blewett's research has led her to suspect that MS and ALS may be caused by an infectious agent that can be transmitted by animals. She spent the last two summers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard exploring the idea. "MS has a lot of mystery to it," she says. "Even though it was first diagnosed 600 years ago, people still don't know what causes the disease, let alone ways to cure it."

Blewett starts her freshman year at Harvard this month. She plans to major in chemical biology and continue her studies in Mandarin, which she began at age 7. — MB

TOP