Fred Hutch Summer Explorers Program Blog
The Fred Hutch Summer Explorers Program has been an amazing opportunity providing high school students with hands-on experience and a view into the world of research. Going into this program I expected an intimidating and intense environment, but the reality is that this program brings students from all over into a place where they can explore and learn from their mentors, teacher assistants, and peers. This two week internship balances learning and networking creating a community between students and speakers while providing us with experience and extensive knowledge in the short time we are here.
An activity that I enjoyed and had an important connection to the real world is learning about PCR which stands for polymerase chain reaction. To figure out if someone was infected with Covid-19 the Covid PCR test was created. This test uses a nasal sample from the patient and provides an accurate result within a couple days. During this program we got experience on how to do a PCR using the B2M gene. The important substances you need to do a PCR are nucleotides, primers, and the Taq polymerase. PCR is reliant on a thermocycler which uses heat and temperature changes to cause certain reactions to happen. The cycle starts with denaturation which is where it gets heated up to 95 degrees celsius which seperates the strands of DNA so the double helix becomes two sides looking like half of a ladder. The secondstage is Annealing which happens at 48-72 degrees celsius where the primers attatch to the DNA which is important to guide the Taq polymerase. For the last step it goes up to 72 degrees celsuis which is where the Taq polymerase attatches to the DNA and uses the nucleotides in the surrounding to create a new strand. This is a very effective technique as you can do this process multiple times and the amount of DNA will double every cycle allowing the creation of millions or billions of the strands. Learning of how a PCR test worked really interedted me in how you can use even the smallest sample and turn that into something suitable for an experiment.
This program gave many opportunities to discuss with speakers and hear their life story and receive a part of their wisdom. All of these speakers have impacted me in some way through letting us know that we are not alone and that we need to keep persisting after failure to succeed. Out of all the guest speakers the most surprising one was when Dr. Anthony Fauci did a question panel. Being able to speak and learn about Dr. Anthony Fauci and his story was an amazing and inspiring experience. These experiences have given me a view into the professional world of research and has added more fuel to the spark that began when I first learned about cells in my 8th grade biology class.
